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"Rielle will not participate in DNA testing or any other invasion of her or her daughter's privacy now or in the future."Drew at AOSHQ:
I'm sure Silky is broken up over his inability to clear his name.Silence is golden, and if you've got enough gold . . .
The theory of increasing poverty among the masses stands at the centre of Marxist thought as well as of older socialist doctrines. The accumulation of poverty parallels the accumulation of capital. . . .Beautiful.
The fact is, that the doctrine of increasing relative social poverty is nothing more than an attempt to give an economic justification to policies based on the resentment of the masses. Growing social poverty means merely growing envy.
Nice guys, pay attention: The lady doesn't owe you anything. Get it? Your mere "niceness" does not impose on her a reciprocal obligation. You are using your niceness as a Trojan Horse to get yourself inside the walled city, and when she spots this scheme and foils it, you cry foul. You'd be better off to make your play straight-up, accept the rejection and move on, rather than using the ambiguity of "niceness" to avert an immediate rejection.
The complaint that girls mistreat "nice guys" is actually a defense mechanism, a sort of sour-grapes method of projecting responsibility for your own shortcomings onto those who have spurned you: It's not that I'm sexually insecure, socially awkward, and a lousy dancer. No, my problem is that I'm nice -- and they're all cold-hearted, selfish bitches.
Guys, study the Damone 5-Point Plan:
Via Hot Air, where Ed Morrisey has a caption contest, and urges commenters to "keep it clean." Eh, I'll wait for the AOSHQ caption contest. Rules? We don't need no stinkin' rules!
UPDATE: OK, the caption contest is now underway at "the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in the blogosphere."
Douthat and Salam admit the influence, at least partly, of New York Times columnist David Brooks on their work. Salama worked for Brooks as a research assistant and calls him "kind of a godfather of reformist conservatism" and points to "national greatness conservatism" --- a phrase coined by Brooks and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol -- as a forerunner of the new reformism. . . . Reform conservatives, like the national greatness conservatives before them, dissent from the anti-government enthusiasms of many on the Right."While I have already written some about what's so wrongheaded with Douthatism -- and will undoubtedly write more -- the main point is that Douthat, Salam, Brooks & Co. are not interested in advancing a conservative policy agenda, they are interested in electing Republicans. On the question of limited government, they offer an echo, not a choice. They don't differ at all from Democrats in their endorsement of a big, expensive, meddlesome federal government; they differ only only in what sort of meddling the government should do, and in wishing to see Republicans in charge of such an all-powerful centralized state.
The family of John Edwards' former mistress, Rielle Hunter, is challenging the former senator to take a DNA paternity test after his claim that he did not father Hunter's six-month old child.Ed Morrisey comments:
In the first reaction from Hunter's family, her younger sister Melissa told ABC News that Edwards should immediately follow through on his pledge to take a paternity test.
"I would challenge him to do so," the sister said. "Somebody must stand up and defend my sister," she said. "I wish that those involved would refrain from bad-mouthing my sister."
Edwards’ attempt to salvage some shred of his personal reputation at the expense of Rielle Hunter has caused this blowback. Let’s consider Melissa’s wrath for a moment. It springs from the notion that Edwards and Hunter didn’t have anything more than a physical affair and that Rielle slept with his campaign manager at nearly the same time -- which certainly paints Hunter as something less than a virtuous woman.In other words, from the standpoint of Hunter's family, Edwards' claim boils down to, "Rielle, you nasty slut." I wonder what Edwards-worshipping Amanda Marcotte will say about this? Will she accuse Rielle of internalizing the patriarchal condemnation of female promiscuity?
"I strongly condemn the outbreak of violence in Georgia, and urge an immediate end to armed conflict. Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war. Georgia's territorial integrity must be respected. All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis."
Obama refers to "the outbreak of violence," calls on "both sides" to seek peace, and invokes "the international community." Meanwhile, McCain bluntly speaks of the Russian invasion and makes prominent mention of the NATO military alliance:
Today, news reports indicate that Russian military forces crossed an internationally-recognized border into the sovereign territory of Georgia. Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territorySo, if getting tough with the Russkies is what you want, Maverick's your man.
We should immediately call a meeting of the North Atlantic Council to assess Georgia's security and review measures NATO can take to contribute to stabilizing this very dangerous situation.
[W]e have the very first pictures of a very personal backyard ceremony for John Edwards and his wife.Here's Elizabeth Edwards at the July 2007 "BlogHer" conference, talking about "values" and religion and renewing her wedding vows:
Elizabeth Edwards is talking in a new chapter for her memoirs 'Saving Graces' about her life right now and the renewal of their vows. And we'll show you those pictures, walking down the aisle again."
I am left with a very uncomfortable truth -- both John and Elizabeth Edwards cynically used their marriage as a means to help John Edwards win an election. . . .A sucker is born every minute.
[I]f you gave John and Elizabeth Edwards time, money, support, or goodwill, they played you.
They made a conscious decision to make their relationship a focus throughout the campaign.
Of course, if she knows it’s all BS and she’s still covering up for her husband, well, we’re all entitled to our personal Stockholm Syndromes.But ... the personal is political!
He said she and another campaign aide, Andrew Young, who claimed paternity of Ms. Hunter's child, were being dogged by tabloid reporters who believed she had an affair with Mr. Edwards and fathered the child. . . .Why am I thinking of words like "consigliere" and "hush money" here? And why am I reminded of Vernon Jordan arranging for Monica Lewinsky to get a job in New York?
He said Mr. Edwards did not know about the arrangement.
"The money was purely and simply to get them out of North Carolina and to get them into a stable place," he said. "They were unable to afford a second home. It was to give them the ability to live somewhere where they wouldn't be harassed."
The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Center now has online "Sense and Sexuality," a new pamphlet by Dr. Miriam Grossman that will be distributed this fall at colleges and universities. The pamphlet is aimed at helping girls avoid the "hookup" culture on campus. Here's something interesting from the pamphlet:Science has confirmed the existence of "beer goggles" . . .
In a British study, 80 college students rated photos of unfamiliar faces of men and women their age; alcohol consumption significantly raised the scores given to photos of the opposite sex. Drinking affects the nucleus accumbens, the area of the brain used to determine facial attractiveness. It’s probably one of several reasons that casual, high risk sex is often preceded by alcohol consumption. In the morning, you both look different.
The media has got every angle covered:They're not exactly rooting for Barack Obama, but prominent white supremacists anticipate a boost to their cause if he becomes the first black president. His election, they say, would trigger a backlash - whites rising up, a revolution of sorts - that they think is long overdue. He'd be a "visual aid," says former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, in trying to bring others around to their view that whites have lost control of America.
British TV news anchor Ulrika Jonsson speaks bluntly about the physical toll of motherhood:I really haven't had the world's most extravagant breast augmentation operation. It's just what happens to a woman's body when she has her fourth child. . . .
My body has done something miraculous by giving birth to a fourth baby - and I am proud to show off the after-effects of that, even if it is the kind of body I never thought I would inhabit. . . .
I have spent a small fortune purchasing unfeasibly large brassieres on the internet in an attempt to contain these two overgrown barrage balloons that now pass for my breasts. . . .
I feel I have generously donated my body, including my boobs, over a period of 14 years to the creation of my extraordinary brood.
My official stance is that unless it’s a matter of hypocrisy, it's none of your damn business. . . . Edwards, as far as I know, has never been a "sanctity of marriage" wanker, and so this is officially None Of Our Business, and anyone who dogged him on this story should be fired on the principle that they don’t know journalism from rooting around in the trash. Hypocrisy is a story; human weakness is not.Idiot. Am I the only one who remembers how the John-and-His-Heroic-Cancer-Survivor-Wife story was sold to the public as symbolic of Edwards' incredible sensitivity and caring? That Edwards was engaged in a game of make-believe -- attempting to benefit politically from a reputation as a loyal husband while simultaneously shagging Rielle Hunter -- ought to be hypocrisy enough for anyone, regardless of his political positions.
Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some – most recently – caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences. . . .This is utter crap. Just how "absurd" were those tabloid "lies"? Edwards now denies paternity, but he previously denied the affair he now admits. And exactly why was he meeting with Rielle Hunter in L.A., if this is all old news and he is not the father of her child?
[A] recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private.
Overheard in the office: "Why would Edwards admit the affair but deny fathering the child?"Remember that thing about doormats and footprints, Mrs. Edwards?
I'll tell you why: Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with incurable cancer in late March of 2007. Rielle Hunter's baby was born in late February of 2008. That means that if Edwards is the father, he was definitely still carrying on the affair with Hunter after he knew his wife's cancer was back.
Interesting news from Ohio: The day began with [Cincinnati] Enquirer readers in Butler County picking up copies of the paper's Hometown section and finding an ad paid for by the campaign committee of Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones, a Republican, challenging McCain to speak out on immigration - an issue that has come up infrequently on the campaign trail.
Jones has made a national reputation as a hard-liner on illegal immigrants and is opposed to plans such as the one supported by McCain and the Bush administration giving illegal aliens a path to citizenship.
"Are you avoiding this American issue?" the sheriff asked McCain in his newspaper ad. "We are all ears."
By early afternoon, the McCain campaign put out a statement in response to Jones raising an issue that they had not planned to put on the McCain agenda Thursday.
"John McCain will secure the borders first as president," campaign spokesman Paul Lindsay said. "But he also believes we need a comprehensive solution to the issue of illegal immigration."
YAF's Jason Mattera:Thousands of adoring supporters in the under-30 set turned out to hear him speak. Drawn by his infectious optimism and electrified by the message of hope and change, the youthful crowd interrupted his speeches with bursts of uncontrollable cheers and tremendous applause. The man in the spotlight wasn't Barack Obama. It was Ronald Reagan.Read the whole thing. Jason has some suggestions on how Republicans can recapture the youth vote.
If this comes as a surprise, it shouldn't. Long before Mr. Obama began appealing to the elusive youth vote, "The Gipper" attracted thousands of young people to his cause. . . .
Obama's taking a week's vacation in Hawaii? At a time when he's neck-and-neck in the polls? With the PUMA crisis unresolved?
"Unity" in Denver may be more difficult to achieve that some realize:Brenda Krause is tired of fearmongering among the Democrats.While Team Obama was busy jetting The One around Europe, they were failing to quench the PUMA rebellion on the home front:
The 55-year-old delegate to the Democratic National Convention doesn't think the party -- or its unity -- is in any way compromised by her voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton at the roll call. . . .
Though the majority of the Democratic Party backs Sen. Barack Obama, an undercurrent of staunch and loyal Clinton supporters say they'll fight all the way to the national convention, which begins Aug. 25 in Denver, to put her name on the ballot.
With the clock running out on preparations for the Democratic convention, advisers to Sen. Barack Obama are scrambling to reach a compromise with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to appease her supporters and find roles for her and her husband.
That they're still "scrambling" two months after Obama clinched the nomination -- and barely two weeks before the convention -- suggests an alarming inattention to the problem. And the fact that Obama still hasn't announced his running mate should also worry Democrats
Being linked to "big oil" turned into a big problem for Tennessee Republican freshman Rep. David Davis, who became the first congressman from that state to lose in a primary in more than four decades.If being linked to "Big Oil" can hurt a candidate in a Republican primary (?!) what would be the effect of linking a Republican to "Big Oil" in the general election? Of course, there are plenty of Democrats in Congress who've taken money from "Big Oil" -- including Exxon's sweetheart Barack Obama -- so Republicans could possibly fight fire with fire.
Johnson City Mayor Phil Roe beat Davis by a 500-vote margin Thursday in the solidly Republican 1st District in the northeastern corner of the state. . . .
The race became increasingly acrimonious as the primary election neared. Roe ran a TV ad accusing Davis of selling out to "Big Oil" by accepting money from industry PACs and backing legislation supporting offshore drilling.
Missouri state Rep. Scott Muschany, R-Frontenac, was indicted today in connection with a reported sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl on May 17, the day after this year’s Legislative session ended.The alleged victim is the daughter of a state employee.The most dangerous man in the world is always "mom's boyfriend."
The girl’s mother and Muschany -– who is married and has two children --were romantically involved, the woman said. A Cole County grand jury returned an indictment today charging Muschany with the Class C felony of "deviate sexual assault." ...
Muschany, 42, was booked into the Cole County Jail today at 2:50 and he was released after posting a $5,000 bond.
A 24-year-old Queens woman was beaten to death at a Times Square club packed with rap royalty celebrating Lil' Kim's birthday, and the prime suspects are club employees, police sources said.Kind of like the shooting during the Skynyrd show at that redneck bar down in Georgia . . .
A maintenance worker Wednesday found Ingrid (China) Rivera's battered body stuffed in a rooftop electrical room above Spotlight Live. . . .
She had been missing since Sunday when, wearing a blue dress and silver heels, she spent the night at Lil' Kim's bash, which was attended by Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, Lamar Odom and Wyclef Jean.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. . . . The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor.Oops. Sorry. Wrong party. What Ambinder actually has is the Democratic Party platform, which Allah says is "written carefully and vaguely enough that you can extract whatever you want from it, which of course is the point." Which means that the moonbat left will be disappointed, as they would with any platform calling for anything short of the strangulation of the last Christian with the entrails of the last Republican.
Continued liveblogging of the Young America's Foundation National Conservative Student Conference.If the polls are right, a public tired of Republicans is beginning to think an increasingly bothersome Obama would be no better -- and maybe a lot worse. . . .This is the real hope of the GOP this year: That liberals have once again demonstrated how smart they are by outsmarting themselves.
In a tough year like this, Democrats could probably have defeated Republican John McCain with a flawed, but seasoned candidate like Hillary Clinton. But long-suffering liberals convinced their party to go with a messiah rather than a dependable nominee -- and thereby they probably will get neither.
The party's rising prospects point toward a once unthinkable goal: a reversal of the "Great Reversal," the switch in political loyalties in the 1960s that made the South a Republican stronghold for a generation.It was not until the 1990s that the GOP solidified its dominance in the South. While Republican presidents beginning with Eisenhower did well in the South, but that realignment didn't trickle down to the state and local level until the '90s. As recently as 1994, my native Georgia had two Democratic senators and only three Republican congressmen. It wasn't until 2002 that Georgia elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction.
If the race for the White House remains close, the final decision may be rest in the hands of voters who are not yet paying attention to the campaign. Each night, Rasmussen Reports asks survey participants to let us know how closely they are following the election using a 9-point scale. People answering "9" say they are following the race "on a daily basis." . . .This goes to a basic point: Elections always boil down to independent "swing" voters, who pay less attention to politics -- who are less informed -- than partisans.
[A]mong the undecided voters, just 19% say they're paying that much attention. On that nine-point scale, most undecided voters say their interest in the campaign is a "6" or less.
Eighty-seven percent (87%) of Fox News viewers say they are likely to vote for John McCain, while those who watch CNN and MSNBC plan to support Barack Obama in November by more than two to one.Not surprising.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 65% of CNN voters plan to vote for the Democratic candidate versus 26% who intend to go for the Republican. Similarly, MSNBC watchers plan to vote for Obama over McCain 63% to 30%. ...
Among those who get their information on the presidential campaign from local television, the new survey finds that the amount of time one watches impacts how they plan to vote. Those who watch local news every day support Obama over McCain 52% to 42%. But for those who say they watch several days a week but not every day, it’s McCain over Obama 50% to 43%.
In the culmination of a racially fraught Congressional campaign in Memphis, a black candidate is linking her liberal-leaning white primary opponent in Thursday's contest, Representative Steve Cohen, to the Ku Klux Klan in a television advertisement. . . .Read the whole thing -- 662 words and "Democrat" is not one of them.
The advertisement for the challenger, Nikki Tinker, juxtaposes Mr. Cohen's picture with that of a hooded Klansman, and criticizes Mr. Cohen for voting against renaming a park in Memphis currently named for the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Ku Klux Klan founder.
"This makes you wonder," a black former county commissioner, Walter Bailey, says in the advertisement. "Who is the real Steve Cohen?"
"We were shocked to see the recent ads run by the Nikki Tinker for Congress campaign. We believe the ads are offensive and divisive," said Ellen Malcolm, the group's director. "EMILY's List does not condone or support these types of attacks."While smearing Republicans is still fair game, Democrats aren't supposed to say such things about each other.
Those ads brought Tinker another blast when MSNBC's Keith Olbermann named her tonight as his "Worst Person in the World," a regular over-the-top satire on his program.
Like many alt weeklies, the paper's bread-and-butter is politics, and from the spring of 2005 on, its political op-eds comprise an apparently unbroken sequence of pilfered prose. The Bulletin's archives reveal a strong preference for the online magazine Salon -- in particular, the punditry of Joe Conason and Sidney Blumenthal. Compiling a complete annotated list of articles would require the services of a half-dozen unpaid interns, so a few examples will have to suffice.Plagiarizing Sidney Blumenthal? Talk about desperation.
She refuses to get breast implants:Twenty-three-year-old box-office babe Keira Knightley recently refused to have her boobs enhanced in publicity photos for her new movie "The Duchess."
"She is proud of her body and doesn't want it altered," a source told Britain's Daily Mail last week.
Is the biggest celebrity in the world ready to help your family?Simple and direct, reinforcing basic themes.
The real Obama promises higher taxes, more government spending. So, fewer jobs.
Renewable energy to transform our economy, create jobs and energy independence, that's John McCain.
[O]n specific issues, Obama is treading water or sinking a bit. On the number one issue of the campaign right now, the economy, Obama leads McCain 43%-39%, compared to 44%-37% reported by TIME's poll in June. Despite his highly touted tour of Europe, the Middle East and Afghanistan last month, Obama may be inNote, of course, that Time describes bad news for Obama as "trouble"; bad news for McCain would be ... Hope?
something of a late summer slump. The poll shows that voters have increased
their faith in McCain's ability to manage the Iraq war, favoring him over Obama by a margin of 51%-36%, a five point jump since June.
Former Virginia Republican Party chairwoman Kate Obenshain is the banquet speaker tonight at the Young America's Foundation National Conservative Student Conference. The dinner entree is filet of salmon.Analogies from sports are often employed to describe the competitive clash of politics and I've used a baseball metaphor myself to describe the current presidential campaign.Read the whole thing. (That means you, Dave Weigel.)
However, my eyebrows were raised when I learned that Internet poll guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight (538 = total number of Electoral College votes) comes to political punditry from a background of baseball statistics. . . .
The results on Nov. 4 may very well match Silver's projections (currently 295 EVs for Obama, 243 for McCain), but this is merely the extrapolation of current numbers over an imaginary 90-day event-free path to Election Day, which cannot be assumed.
Ben Stein is not amused:
This little tramp, who isn't even close to being pretty, is belittling a man who spent six years in brutal captivity for defending his country.Ouch.
Greetings from the Marvin Center at George Washington University, where I'm covering the 30th National Conservative Student Conference, sponsored by Young America's Foundation. Will be updating regularly . . . 9:20 p.m. -- Rich Lowry was funny. And depressing. The steak was delicious and the carrot cake was good."Senator Obama's stance on offshore oil drilling has been mischaracterized. He has not changed his position. He has continually campaigned against additional drilling, calling the policy a 'gimmick' saying it was a 'scheme' and ridiculing those who support it. With his steadfast opposition to John McCain's 'all of the above' approach to our energy crisis, Americans should know that Barack Obama remains opposed to additional domestic oil drilling. Speaker Pelosi, MoveOn.org and the Sierra Club can take comfort from the fact that Barack Obama still opposes additional domestic oil drilling. Meanwhile, the American people can be sure that John McCain will do what is necessary to reduce this country's dependence on Middle East oil and bring down prices at the pump."That's going to leave a mark.
David Brooks puts his finger on something about the disconnect between The One and the many:His childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas, Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond. . . .Maybe this is why Obama used the word "planet" eight times in Monday's speech -- his identity is global in scope and, like many of his peers in the cosmopolitan elite, he views national and local attachments as inherently backward and reactionary. UPDATE: John Zogby:
His college years were spent on both coasts. He was a community organizer for three years but left before he could be truly effective. He became a state legislator, but he was in the Legislature, not of it. . . .
If Obama is fully a member of any club — and perhaps he isn’t — it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama’s age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware. It’s not clear what the rest of America makes of them.
"The survey results come as Obama, fresh off what had been characterized as a triumphant tour of the Middle East and Europe, including a speech to 200,000 Germans in Berlin. That trip quickly became fodder for an aggressive response ad by the McCain campaign that questioned whether Obama's popularity around the world meant he was ready to lead the U.S."(Via Instapundit.) Rasmussen shows McCain maintaining a 47%-46% lead for the second day in a row. Since July 21, Obama's lead in the RCP average has shrunk from 4.7 points to 2.3 points.
"If you think about this week, what they've been good at is distraction," he said during an expansive and quite humid early morning press conference [inWho's been talking about Paris and Britney, Senator? The "Celeb" ad was about your opposition to new oil drilling, and high fuel costs are a major factor in the recession -- Florida's a tourism-dependent state and, at $4 a gallon, folks can't afford to drive to Disney World. So instead of whining about "distraction," why not just tell us again about your plan to fix the energy problem with tire gauges?
Florida]. "You've got statistics saying we lost another 50,000 jobs. That Florida is in recession for the first time in a decade and a half. And what was being talked about was Paris and Britney."
We could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You’d actually save just as much.
As Morrissey demonstrates from multiple sources, this is simply untrue, the silliness of the argument goes beyond its falsehood:
The success of Politico actually seems like an incredibly discouraging sign for the media. . . . A year-and-a-half after launch, it's getting 3.5 million unique visitors per month and 25 million page views. And yet not only is it unprofitable, but 60 percent of its revenues come from advertising in the 27,000 circulation print version. In other words: Politico got the online readership it dreamed of, but it hasn't come even close to figuring out how to monetize it.OK, to start with, the failure of online advertising to create the kind of revenue stream needed to sustain a full-scale news operation is not news. This goes back to the era of the dot-com bubble, when Salon.com got a huge investment and a lot of hype and produced nothing but red ink -- or should that be "red pixels"?
Saw part of this speech today:Our changing climate is placing our planet in peril. . . .Buzz Lightyear for President! Only the Space Ranger of Star Command and the Interstellar Alliance can protect you from Emperor Zug! What a bunch of apocalyptic hooey . . . UPDATE: Further analysis:
When it comes to our economy, our security, and the very future of our planet, the choices we make in November and over the next few years will shape the next decade, if not the century. . . .
Without a doubt, this addiction [to oil] is one of the most dangerous and urgent threats this nation has ever faced -- from the gas prices that are wiping out your paychecks and straining businesses to the jobs that are disappearing from this state; from the instability and terror bred in the Middle East to the rising oceans and record drought and spreading famine that could engulf our planet. . . .
Will we be the generation that leaves our children a planet in decline, or a world that is clean, and safe, and thriving? . . .
For the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we must end the age of oil in our time. . . .
Along with the cap-and-trade program I've proposed, we will reduce our dangerous carbon emissions 80% by 2050 and slow the warming of our planet. . . .
So there is a real choice in this election - a choice about what kind of future we want for this country and this planet. . . .
We can watch other countries create the industries and the jobs that will fuel our future, and leave our children a planet that grows more dangerous and unlivable by the day.
. . . peril . . . turmoil . . . the most dangerous and urgent threats this nation has ever faced . . . a threat that goes to the very heart of who we are as a nation . . . melting our glaciers and setting off dangerous weather patterns . . . our families and our economy suffer and our future is put in jeopardy . . . crisis we have no control over . . .
Terrific. The guy who lacks a single day’s experience in the private sector is going to transform our entire economy.
As the Twin Cities and Denver gear up for four days of politics and parties during the Republican and Democratic national conventions, advocacy groups in both cities are getting set to combat what they believe will be a surge in prostitution.The Republicans will have a lot of blonde, busty women buzzing around, but those are just the wives of the Texas delegates. The Democrats will be too busy snorting coke to bother with prostitution.
But police in both cities say that the groups are mistaken and that research indicates there will be no increase in the sex trade. . . .
St. Paul police spokesman Tom Walsh said his department discussed the issue with police in New York and Boston, which hosted the 2004 Republican and Democratic conventions, respectively.
"And what they have reported to us is that is that there is not an increase in that kind of traffic," Walsh said. "There is so much going on, I don't know that there is a lot of unstructured time to be involved in any other activities. ... Is it something we are going to monitor? It is."
Lt. Ron Saunier of the Denver police said that while police in that city have set up several committees to deal with problems anticipated during the Aug. 25-28 Democratic convention, there's no committee on prostitution. "I have not heard of any information at this time about increased prostitution during the event," he said.
This is the first time McCain has enjoyed even a statistically insignificant advantage of any sort since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination on June 3. . . .Allah: "It has to be the ads." Perhaps. Or perhaps weeks of relentless pounding by Team Maverick have gradually made Americans aware of the fact that Obama is a liberal who has only been in the Senate for three years and whose energy "plan" consists primarily of a Carteresque "windfall profits tax."
A week ago today, Obama had a three-percentage point lead and the candidates were even among unaffiliated voters. Today, McCain leads 52% to 37% among unaffiliateds.
I've had a bad feeling about the direction of the campaign for the past couple weeks. . . . The latest tracking polls seem to indicate that McCain's negative attacks are having an impact. The corollary is that Obama's response hasn't been working, or at least it hasn't been enough.The lefty makes the good point that national polls can be misleading because, ultimately, it comes down to getting to 270 the Electoral College and, as Allah noted, "The same Rasmussen poll puts the electoral college at Obama 273, McCain 227."
On a street in Shenandoah, Pa., deep in the heart of the anthracite coal region, six White teens took their racial hatred to a higher level. They confronted 25-year-old Luis Ramirez, an undocumented worker, and beat him to death. . . .Right. And immediately after watching "Fox & Friends" this morning, I'll go perpetrate whatever hateful atrocity Steve Doocy suggests. (He's like that, you know.)
Unindicted co-conspirators are millions of Americans and the far-right mass media. . . .
But now, self-aggrandizing politicians and media talk show hosts and pundits, who erroneously believe they are populists, spew hate-filled torrents of bigotry and fear-mongering.
I don’t know if the six teens who murdered Luis Ramirez listen to talk radio, watch Fox News, or read web blogs and anonymous call-ins and letters to the local newspaper. They don’t have to. Their community does.
