Sailer, Douthat and comments

Now, I finally see the cause of Ross Douthat's new "purge the comments" policy. Monday, Douthat acknowledged that he had used some research from Steve Sailer without proper attribution.

Sailer, a frequent contributor to VDare, is unfraid of the PC police (who've done about all the damage they could do to him by now). It appears that the Douthat-Sailer connection has put Douthat into a cross-current between two forces:

• Leftists who are excoriating Douthat as a crypto-racist for using material from Sailer, who has written some very blunt things about race.
• VDare readers who are excoriating Douthat as a wussified sellout for failing to be as blunt as Sailer is about the interaction of race, immigration, economics and politics.

Earlier, before I realized what was going on, I was sneering at Douthat for being a typical Harvard intellectual snob. Don't get me wrong, I still have a real chip on my shoulder about Ivy League elitists who presume to talk of the working class, but now that I see what Douthat's gotten himself into the middle of, I feel sorry for him.

Here he is, a perfectly respectable Harvard-educated conservative whiz kid, with a new book that's getting lots of critical buzz. Suddenly, he finds himself tagged as a plagiarist and a fellow traveler of racists.

Well, I still doubt I'll make it down to DuPont Circle for Douthat's swanky shindig tonight, but God help the poor boy now. Doubt he'll slum over here to read this (Harvard types don't do Blogspot) but if he did, my advice would be:

• 1. Stay to the right of the Left. Don't try to get into a one-upmanship situation where you're trying to outdo them in multicultural enthusiasm. You can't win that fight.
• 2. Avoid arguments with Paleos. Those guys play for keeps and (as Joan Jett said) they don't give a damn about their bad reputations.
• 3. Keep your friends close, and your Neocons closer. This is the flip-side of my advice about the Paleos. Whatever your quarrels with the Neos, avoid making any outright enemies, or next thing you know, you're an "Unpatriotic Conservative" and NRO will dump you like yesterday's garbage.

I know, I know -- my routine bitching about Bill Kristol is a violation of Rule 3, but once a Republican gets a column in the New York Times, nobody in the movement trusts him anymore and he's too big to notice a mere blogger. So there's not really a downside to slamming Kristol now, movement-wise.

Also, I suppose the little thing between me and Clark Stooksbury could be viewed as violation of Rule 2, but Stooksbury started that. Stooksbury is a fan of Dreher, and I panned Crunchy Cons, so Stooksbury considers me evil. But if I've made a mortal enemy by criticizing the Buddhist economics (!) of Crunchy Cons from an Austrian perspective, I don't know what can be done to remedy the problem. When it comes to economics, Mises and Hayek are right and Buddhists are wrong.

At any rate, the key to navigating the kind of situation Douthat appears to have gotten himself into is to remember: You are a conservative. Conservatives are your friends. Liberals are not your friends and don't want to be your friends. Never risk alienating conservatives by attempting to appease the liberals.

If it all goes sideways, however, and Douthat ends up as persona non grata amongst his respectable conservative (former) friends, my advice is: Libertarianism.

No one can ever be kicked out of libertarianism, because no one's in charge, and there's like a Baskin-Robbins assortment of factions. However radical you become, you can always find some fringe anarchist splinter that will take you in. It's a come-as-you-are movement. There's probably even some Buddhist libertarians, but that's not my fault.

UPDATE: Having read the column in which Sailer takes credit for his own ideas in the Douthat/Reihan book, I now hate Douthat a little less. But he's still Harvard, so I still hate him. Harvard, New York Times, PBS, AFL-CIO, al Qaeda -- part of my short list of institutions that qualify everyone associated with them for automatic hatred.

Where did Maverick's media mojo go?

Reporters can be arrogant jerks, but in press relations as in any other business, "the customer is always right" -- it's not smart for campaign aides to get snippy with the media:



(Via Memeorandum and HuffPo.) Some of my best friends are publicists, and I've sometimes given people advice on P.R. One thing I try to explain is that reporters generally pride themselves on their haughty disdain for P.R. people, and if there's any thing that gets on a reporter's nerves, it's being jerked around by some miserable flack.

Yeah, I said the f-word: flack, an epithet for P.R. people that reporters use in the newsroom with a tone of complete contempt, e.g., "Can you believe the nerve of these people? I called to set up an interview with the administrator, and that stupid flack didn't even know when the guy was going to be back in his office. Send me a press release offering the guy for an interview, and the moron doesn't even know her own guy's schedule."

The fact that McCain's flacks are both females is typical of the current trend. At some point, a couple of decades ago, somebody got the idea that "public relations" was a job for pretty girls with nice smiles and no brains -- a friendly, chirpy "spokesperson" -- and never mind if they actually know how to write a press release or deal with reporters.

Hubris watch

Having predicted from the git-go that this European excursion would be a disaster for Barack Obama, I now see the albatrosses are flocking aboard:

Senator John McCain's trip to Iraq last spring was a low-key affair: With his ordinary retinue of reporters following him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on his arrival in Baghdad from New York, with just two sentences tacked onto the "in other political news" portion of his newscast.
But when Obama heads for Iraq and other locations overseas this summer, Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Obama on successive nights.

He'll be surrounded in a cocoon of liberal media adulation, a thousand cameras on the scene to record that historical moment when, at long last, Hope jumps the shark.

Or rides the tank, as it were.

Massachusetts: The Gay Vegas

Cotton Mather must be rolling in his grave:

On Tuesday, the State Senate voted to repeal a 1913 law that prevents Massachusetts from marrying out-of-state couples if their marriages would not be legal in their home states. The repeal, which passed with no objections on a voice vote, is expected to pass the House later this week. Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat and a supporter of same-sex marriage whose 18-year-old daughter recently disclosed publicly that she is a lesbian, has said he will sign the repeal. . . .
The law, believed to have been designed to uphold other states' bans on interracial marriage, was invoked in 2004 by Gov. Mitt Romney, a same-sex marriage opponent who said he did not want to make Massachusetts "the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage."

Quick points:

• Voice vote -- Spineless wimps who don't want to put their votes on the record for the people to see.
• Lesbian daughter -- Isn't that pretty much mandatory for 18-year-olds in Massachusetts nowadays? Except for the infamous teen sluts of Gloucester, I mean.
• Mitt Romney -- Notice the way they worked him into the story, just making sure to tag him as a homophobe in case he gets tapped as GOP running mate.

The irresistible logic of "progress" is a fascinating thing to watch. "Gay marriage" -- an unheard-of idea just a few years ago -- is now opposed only by bigoted troglodytes. This all seems vaguely familiar:

In our day, innovations march with so rapid a stride that they quite take away one's breath. The fantastical project of yesterday, which was mentioned only to be ridiculed, is to-day the audacious reform, and will be tomorrow the accomplished fact.

Once you accept "progress" and other such radical abstractions as fundamental principles, insisting that custom and tradition must always yield to theory, you have weighed anchor and cast off, and the ultimate destination is destruction.

Of the folly of "progress," Chesterton said it best: "I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday." Burke especially scorned the radical notion of moral progress:

We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress among us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality, nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité -- ah, yes, and the Goddess of Reason! Listen closely, friend, and you can hear those tumbrels on their way to the guillotine.

Debunking Democrat energy myths

Jimmie at Sundries Shack takes on the pet claim of liberals that we can't "drill our way out" of the current oil price situation because it takes so long to bring oil to market:

According to a study quoted in this Wall Street Journal article, we could have crude oil out of the ground from the coast of California “within a year”. We know where the oil is, the water there is shallow, and we’ve actually had the platforms in place since before the ban went into place. There is an estimated 10 billion (yes, billion with a big, fat “B”) barrels of oil off the coast of California.
Even if a tenth of that is in those places, that’s enough oil to supply America for seven weeks. I don’t think that ten percent is an unreasonable estimate, either.

Jimmie's got lots more examples -- read the whole thing -- but I like this California thing best. I'd love to see T. Boone Pickens put about a half-dozen oil rigs just off the coast of Malibu, if only to annoy Barbra Streisand. In fact, Newt Gingrich should change his slogan to, "Drill Here, Drill Now, Annoy Barbra Streisand."

'Allegedly,' my foot

Headline in the Salt Lake Tribune:

Arrest warrant issued for woman whose bogus tip allegedly triggered FLDS raid

"Allegedly" is a legalism originally imposed on newspapers by lawyers concerned about libel prosecutions, and since abused to the point of absurdity by media liberals afraid to call a crook a crook, implying doubt about guilt even in situations where guilt is utterly clear.

I have sometimes seen cases where, in discussing the case of a convicted murderer facing a sentencing hearing, reporters feel the need to qualify their description of the killer's crimes with "allegedly" or "according to prosecutors"! This kind of nonsense makes me want to scream:

"For the love of H.L. Mencken and all that's holy, man, this perp's been read his rights, given his day in court, tried and convicted by a jury of his peers! If they hanged him tomorrow, he'd have no cause to complain. He hacked his mother to death and was covered in her blood when the cops caught him with the bloody knife in his hand. He told the cops -- and I quote -- 'The old nag had it comin' to her.' What in God's green earth is this 'allegedly' doing in your story? Are you afraid this scum's going to get his court-appointed lawyer to sue you for defamation? Don't you think that weak-chinned weasel from the public-defenders office might be too busy trying to keep his guilty-as-sin client from riding the needle to be worried about what you write in a newspaper?"

The ridiculous overuse of "allegedly" so annoyed Wes Pruden that, during his tenure as editor of The Washington Times, he banned any variation of the word -- allege, alleged, allegedly, allegation -- from the newspaper. "Police said," or some variation thereof, was the preferred way of dealing with criminal complaints, and persons charged with crimes were "accused robbers" or "robbery suspects," etc.

This latest development in the case of Rosita Swinton -- discussed by Don Surber at some length -- highlights how prosecutors and the press sometimes cooperate in obscuring unpleasant truths.

What a reasonable person can discern about this case by careful reading of the press accounts is this:

• Swinton, a Colorado resident who was also a pledged state Democratic convention delegate for Barack Obama, has a habit of hoax phone calls in which she pretends to be an abuse victim, for which she has been previously prosecuted.
• At some point last year, perhaps as a result of watching an "Oprah" segment on polygamy, Swinton developed an obsessive interest in the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) -- rogue Mormons disavowed by the mainstream LDS Church -- and began devouring news accounts of the group's activities.
• In late March, in phone calls to an Arizona activist who runs an anti-polygamy group, Swinton claimed to be an FLDS teenager named "Sarah" who was being abused in a polygamist marriage.
• Subsequently, a Texas family-crisis hotline received similar calls, which were the basis for the search warrant that led to the raid on the El Dorado FLDS compound.
• Texas Rangers later flew to Colorado, interrogated Swinton and conducted a search of her home.
• The Texas child-welfare officials who conducted the El Dorado raid (and tried to put more than 400 FLDS children, including tiny infant babies, into foster care) have refused to confirm that Swinton, the known phone hoaxer, was the bogus "Sarah" named in the warrrant, or that her hoax calls were the sole basis for the warrant.

The Texas child-welfare officials obviously don't want to admit that their paramilitary raid -- employing SWAT teams with M-16s and armored personnel carriers --was the result of a hoax, since such an admission (a) would expose them as the gullible chumps they are, (b) potentially result in their unemployment, (c) might expose them to civil liability, and (d) would undermine the prosecution of whatever crimes the FLDS allegedly committed.

The clever reader will note that the original lurid tabloid-style reports about the El Dorado raid -- Virgin Teens Raped by Sick Sex Cult! -- weren't really heavy on the kind of caveats that now are used to hide the idiocy of the Texas officials allegedly duped by the alleged hoaxter, Rosita Swinton. For some reason, reporters are extending to Swinton and the Texas officials she duped a presumption of innocence that was sadly lacking when the "Sarah" affidavit was posted online.

Look, I have about as much respect for the kook theology of Mormonism as I have for Scientology or the "Heaven's Gate" suicide cult, and regard the FLDS as a kind of ultra-kook fringe for hard-core kooks who consider the more mainstream Mormon kooks as insufficiently kooky. The polygamist practices of the FLDS -- "elders" with a dozen or more wives, teen brides forced to become the fourth or fifth or 17th wife of patriarchal geezers -- are creepy beyond words.

But you know what? Welcome to America, where creepy kooks have rights, too. However creepy, kooky or indeed criminal the actions of the FLDS in Texas, they apparently weren't disturbing their neighbors or posing any threat to the larger community. If -- as now appears almost certain -- the only pretext for the raid was a hoax call from an obsessed psycho in Colorado who wasn't a Mormon and had never been within 500 miles of El Dorado, Texas, then these FLDS people are victims of government abuse, and any charges against them based on this warrant will never withstand appellate scrutiny.

A man's home is his castle, and if it so happens that his castle is a kook compound where he's keeping a harem -- hey, why doesn't somebody stage a raid on Hugh Hefner? A lot of people are upset at the idea of the teen mothers at the FLDS compound, but I've said it before and I'll say it again: Texas has the highest teen birth rate in America. If every pregnant 15-year-old in Texas is justification for a paramilitary raid, they're going to have to hire a lot more SWAT officers.

P.S.: One reason "America's Most Wanted" is my favorite show on TV is that they avoid this "allegedly" crap when dealing with criminals. John Walsh never hesitates to call a perp a "lowlife scum."

Mississippification, Obverse Dept.

"[P]eople who live in states with few blacks seem more open to the idea of a president who is not white."
-- Tim Egan, New York Times

This is the flip side of Mississippification and, furthermore, adds important evidence of The Urkel Effect, a related phenomenon I'm too tired to explain in depth right now.

Ross Douthat stifles dissent

The snotty Harvard punk (hey, I can still say that here, can't I?) assigns an intern to patrol his blog comments, suppressing anyone who points out the absurdity of an Ivy League intellectual posing as a proletarian pundit.

Douthat -- a/k/a the GOP's answer to "Mudcat" -- will be rolling out his snotty punk prescription for the Republican Party at a swank Dupont Circle party for all the other Harvard snobs tomorrow. Have fun with that.

'We need not degrade women'

The Reverend Jackson (who's never actually been the pastor of any church) lectures without any evident hint of irony on the importance of "dignity":



(Via Hot Air.) Criticizing the use of the "n-word" by gangsta rappers and black comedians, he says:

"We need not degrade women and degrade our people in order to make a joke or make a hit."

Degrading women? Flashback, June 2001:

Mr Jackson, who is 59 and married with five children, conceived a daughter with 39-year-old Karin Stanford in mid-1998 while she held a senior post in the Baptist preacher's Rainbow PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) Coalition. . . .
Miss Stanford met Mr Jackson in the mid-Nineties when she was teaching at the University of Georgia and researching a thesis, later published as a book - Beyond the Boundaries: Reverend Jesse Jackson in International Affairs. . . .
Mr Jackson appointed Miss Stanford as head of the coalition's Washington office. When she fell pregnant, Mr Jackson gave her $40,000 (£27,000) from coalition funds to help her relocate to Los Angeles during maternity leave.
She still works there as a part-time researcher for the coalition.

Adultery? Siring bastards with your mistress? Putting the aforesaid mistress on the payroll of your extortion racket ministry? No, no, reverend -- these things are not in the least "degrading."

What next? "Dignity" lectures from Snoop and Ice-T?

Mixed messages

Being in media, I'm always interested by controversies over messages, and today there are a couple of these controversies in the news.

Controversy 1:

A Florida man is using billboards with an image of the burning World Trade Center to encourage votes for a Republican presidential candidate, drawing criticism for politicizing the 9/11 attacks.
"Please Don't Vote for a Democrat" reads the type over the picture of the twin towers after hijacked airliners hit them on September, 11, 2001.
Mike Meehan, a St. Cloud, Florida, businessman who paid to post the billboards in the Orlando area, said former President Clinton should have put a stop to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda before 9/11. He said a Republican president would have done so.
"I believe 9/11 could have been prevented if we'd had a Republican president at the time," Meehan said Wednesday on CNN's "American Morning." . . .
The local Republican Party called the billboard "inappropriate," according to WFTV.

Now, hold on there a minute! Am I the only one who's seen The Path to 9/11? Is it a point of controversy among Republicans whether the head-in-the-sand policies of the Clinton administration were a key cause of U.S. vulnerability to al-Qaeda? And please tell me what, exactly, is the difference between the direct message of Mr. Meehan's billboards and the indirect message of the Bush re-election campaign in 2004?

What the local GOP objects to in Mr. Meehan's billboards is that he's saying clearly and openly what Republicans routinely say in coded terms. Frankly, I prefer the refreshing honesty of Mr. Meehan's message to poll-tested and focus-grouped gobbledygook of the official GOP, and what really bothers me is why any Republican Party official felt the need to pass judgment on Mr. Meehan's billboards.

If I was a GOP spokesman, and I got a call from a reporter asking about those billboards, I'd just say, "Look, it's a free country, pal. It's his money and if that's what he wants to say, it's not the place of the Republican Party to tell him not to say it. So stop trying to bug me about somebody else's billboard. We're running a political party, not a billboard-approval service."

Controversy 2:

A state employee has resigned and officials have disavowed an international advertising campaign that led to calls for an investigation of tourism posters proclaiming "South Carolina is so gay."
The campaign, which plastered the London subway with posters advertising the charms of South Carolina and five major U.S. cities to gay European tourists, landed with a resounding thud in South Carolina, where the issue of gay rights has long been a political flashpoint.
The advertisements were timed for London’s Gay Pride Week, which ended Saturday. The posters touted the attractions of the state to gay tourists, including its "gay beaches" and its Civil War-era plantations.

What this involves is a cultural conflict between the "anointed" experts who dreamed up this ad campaign and the "benighted" taxpayers of South Carolina. (I adopt these terms from Thomas Sowell's excellent book, The Vision of the Anointed.)

To the anointed, there is no cause so just and righteous as "tolerance" toward gays, an attitude that often manifests itself in what can fairly be called gay supremacy: The belief that homosexuals are not merely equal to everyone else, but that their status as a persecuted victim group endows gay people with superior status as moral symbols -- "mascots," to borrow another term from Sowell.

Gay supremacy is everywhere nowadays. The ironic "camp" sensibility of gay culture -- catty and mocking, a sort of satirical travesty of bourgeois values -- permeates everything from fashion magazines to primetime sitcoms. There is scarcely a college campus in America where the billboards in dorm lobbies aren't festooned with fliers advertising various "GLBT" activities. A concern for gays as a crucial element of "diversity" now oozes from the human-resources offices of major corporations.

Given all this, one is hardly surprised that a tourism ad agency would think it a clever thing to plaster the slogan "South Carolina is so gay" all over London during a gay pride festival. The clever, sophisticated agency people who dreamed up this slogan are probably puzzled that their ad campaign has provoked controversy. The agency people are scratching their heads and telling themselves:

After all, the portfolio we showed the state tourism officials included such past successes as, "Lesbians Love Lubbock," "Hoboken [Hearts] Homos," and "Tulsa: America's Transvestite Paradise." Why, we just signed a big new contract to run that campaign, "Cleveland: As Queer As It Gets." So what's up with this homophobic crap all of a sudden? Never mind, we'll still have plenty of business once we get that "Welcome to Brokeback Country" deal in Montana.

The ad people, in other words, have been inside the bubble of elite culture -- and its gay supremacist values -- so long that they'd forgotten that there was a whole 'nother country out there, filled with ordinary Americans who've never set foot inside a "diversity workshop" or a Gender Theory classroom.

'But it was satire, your honor'

Perhaps inspired by the New Yorker, a celebrity attempts a light-hearted spoof:

Comedian and actor Andy Dick was arrested today on suspicion of drug possession and sexual battery after police were called to a disturbance outside a restaurant in Murrieta.Police said they arrived at Buffalo Wild Wings on Murrieta Hot Springs Road at about 1:15 a.m. after receiving reports of an intoxicated man urinating outside. They stopped a truck that was leaving the scene and Dick was in the front eat.
According to Murrieta Police Lt. Dennis Vrooman, a 17-year-old girl said 42-year-old Dick had left the restaurant, walked up to her and pulled down her tank top, exposing her breasts. . . .
Vrooman said Dick was "extremely intoxicated" and that police found marijuana and antianxiety Xanax medication in his pockets.

See? The Xanax gives it away. The comedian was obviously engaging in a parody of the behavior of celebrity perpetual rehab failures like Robert Downey Jr. and Danny Bonaduce. Just a harmless joke, and I'm sure at his trial, Dick will deliver the punchline: "Whaddya mean, she's only 17? She looked like at least a 38 to me!"

Just another reminder (as if such a reminder was needed) of why celebrities are so much smarter and more virtuous than ordinary Americans.

'Kumbaya liberalism'

Michelle Malkin, clever gal that she is, didn't just look at the cover of the latest New Yorker, she actually read the article:

The magazine piece quotes Obama's recommendations for how to stop jihad in a local Chicago newspaper op-ed he had published eight days after the September 11 terrorist attacks. It’s a self-parody of blind, deaf, and dumb Kumbaya liberalism:
"We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers. . . . Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."

Yeah, that stuff in the Koran about smiting the unbelievers -- irrevelevant to those "root causes." The fact that Osama bin Laden is the privileged son of a multimillionaire or that Mohammed Atta was an affluent Egyptian who studied architecture in grad school -- never mind the facts, Democrats must stick to their flawed liberal theories. Michelle continues:

Ayman al-Zawahiri didn’t need more education or wealth to steer him away from Islamic imperialism and working toward a worldwide caliphate. He has a medical degree. So does former Hamas biggie Abdel Rantissi. Seven upper-middle-class jihadi doctors were implicated in the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings. Suspected al Qaeda scientist Affia Siddiqui, still wanted by the FBI for questioning, is a Pakistani who studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis.

And she points out that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is a proud alumnus of North Carolina A&T. The liberal faith in salvation through education -- a modern heresy that was one of the main targets of William F. Buckley's 1951 book God and Man at Yale -- has stubbornly survived more than a half-century of contradictory evidence. This idee fixe, based on the egalitarian notion that the only difference between an MIT grad and a ditch-digger is that the ditch-digger doesn't have an MIT diploma, persists in the liberal mind because, if it were ever abandoned, their entire worldview would collapse like a house of cards.

Always, the liberal education agenda is "more, more, more," an agenda that seems to have no fixed objective nor any limits, so that eventually (if the liberals have their way), the population will be entirely composed of full-time students and school employees. This education uber alles agenda seems mainly designed to keep people in school for decades, rather than letting them go out into the world and do something useful for a living.

And so Obama's solution to jihad is to foist this "progressive" nonsense onto the Arab world? The problem with Obama is not that he represents any new radicalism, but that he represents the same old liberal ideas that have failed wherever they've been tried.

Of Hope and wishes

Writing in the British Guardian, Michael Tomasky engages in wishful thinking:

Obama has done very little and has let some silver-platter opportunities pass him by. He is not redefining McCain.
Some leading conventional-wisdom meisters, like Time's Mark Halperin, like to say that this race is completely about Obama. . . .
But it's not all about Obama. It's also about an unnecessary war that was based on lies. It's about a lousy economy and a housing boom that went bust. It's about $4-a-gallon gas. It's about America's dreadful reputation in the world. It's about federal inaction on a wide range of problems, most notably healthcare and climate change, but a bushel of smaller things besides. It's about 84% of Americans thinking the country is on the wrong track.
In other words, it's about the Republicans - their stewardship (failed), and their ideas (stale). And it's about how committed McCain is to that stewardship and those ideas.
Those - a race about Obama and a race about what the GOP has done to the country - are two different races. And Obama is more likely to win the second one.

Well, if "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas! First of all, it's not just "conventional-wisdom meisters," but veteran Democratic operatives who see this election as a referendum on Obama's readiness for the job of Commander-in-Chief:

"There has never been a major party candidate less relevant in an election than John McCain," said Democratic strategist James Carville. "It's all about Obama."

Tomasky wants the election to be about exactly the issues he wants to discuss, in exactly the terms that he wants to discuss them. A fixed fight, played by ground rules that favor Democrats.

I'm reminded of the Confederate politician who, before the Civil War, supposedly bragged that the South could whip the North in three months fighting with nothing but cornstalks. After the war was over and the South lost, a rival chided the politician about his former boast, to which he responded, "But sir, the Yankees refused to fight with cornstalks."

In other words, you have to fight the fight you're in. Wishful thinking is not a strategy, and if Democrats had wanted an election that was "not about Obama," then why did they nominate this newcomer with no established record whom they've promoted as a celebrity "rock star"?

That is to say, if the Democrats wanted a candidate who was simply "not Republican," then Dennis Kucinich or Christopher Dodd would have done just fine. Instead, like middle-school girls swooning for a teen idol, Democrats got all giddy about Obama, a symbolic tabula rasa onto which they could project their fondest fantasies.

With only three years' in office as a junior senator, with no signature issue except perhaps his early opposition to the war -- a position he's now trying to artfully airbrush -- Obama is inherently a political question mark, and all Tomasky's complaints won't change that.

Rightly or wrongly, independent voters (of which Michalel Tomasky is not one) say they vote "not for the party, but for the man," and the question, "What kind of man is Obama?" -- that is to say, his character -- is foremost in the minds of these undecided "swing" voters.

There is no such question about John McCain. For good or ill, his character, his biography and his record are well known. McCain has been in the Senate more than two decades, his name has been attached to prominent legislation, and he fought a bitter primary battle against George W. Bush in 2000. He cannot be magically transformed into a Bush proxy, no matter how many times Michael Tomasky closes his eyes and wishes it were so.

McCain is the known, Obama is the unknown, and the curiosity of voters about the unknown is both (a) the source of the celebrity-style excitement about Obama, and (b) a glaring political weakness for the Democrat.

Tomasky and his fellow progressives have made their choice, and must live with the consequences. They cannot wish away their candidate's defects any more than the Republicans can pretend that they've nominated the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Wishful thinking is not a strategy. You must fight the fight you're in.

Trouble in the land of Hope?

Item One:

After a brief bout of Obamamania, some Capitol Hill Democrats have begun to complain privately that Barack Obama's presidential campaign is insular, uncooperative and inattentive to their hopes for a broad Democratic victory in November. "They think they know what's right and everyone else is wrong on everything," groused one senior Senate Democratic aide. "They are kind of insufferable at this point."

Item Two:

[T]here are Clinton supporters clinging to the hope that if her name is placed in nomination and the roll call of the states is conducted, she might -- might -- still win.
Heidi Li Feldman, a Georgetown University law professor, insists
there's still "no way of predicting" the outcome should there be a fair vote.
That's because Obama has not secured enough pledged delegates to ensure the
magic number of 2,118 needed to claim victory; the Illinois senator has
gone past that benchmark only with the pledges of about 390 superdelegates — and
they can change their minds at any time up to the moment they cast their ballots.

Item Three:

Big news folks -- it looks like our efforts in contacting those Superdelegates are starting to pay off. . . . There are unconfirmed reports, based on phone banking efforts to reach out to Super Ds, that eight previously Obama SDs expressed that, given the opportunity, they would vote for Hillary at the convention.

Never mind those mere Democrats in America, though -- Obama's gearing up for his Grand Tour of Europe! Say, how many superdelegates does France get?

Obama's rookie season

My latest American Spectator column:

Obama's Long March to the Democratic nomination was not much of a warm-up for the media environment he'll face as the general election campaign comes into clear focus this fall.
It's as if a promising recruit in Class A baseball were to find himself suddenly catapulted into the major leagues, eagerly leaning into the plate in his first at-bat, only to have the pitcher aim a 95-mph fastball at his ear.
Welcome to the big leagues, rookie.
Unlike his upset of Hillary Clinton, the fall season will pit Obama against the concerted efforts of the conservative communications apparatus his campaign has dubbed the "Republican attack machine."
Obama knows all about that machine -- he might never have gotten this far had it not been for the assistance of the Right in making Hillary a soft target for the challenger. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

Union bosses rip off workers

More proof why "corrupt union" is redundant:

The Hudson study found that by 2005, the last full year of reports filed, 21 of the nation’s biggest unions show that their rank and file members’ pensions are only funded at an appalling 67.7%. Conversely, the pension funds of the union bosses are funded at a much better 88.3%. So, the union bosses — all of who have a separate pension fund than their own rank and file members — have made sure THEIR pensions are funded at a much higher rate than that of their own members.
Needless to say, the union bosses administer both their own and the rank and file members’ funds.
The SEIU is particularly egregious in that the union bosses have a pension funded at 103% while to poor rank and file members are only at a paltry 75% funded.

The whole purpose of labor unions is to collect money to pay fat salaries for the lazy goons who do no actual work. Unions exist exclusively to serve the interests of their leadership, and the poor saps in the rank-and-file -- forced to pay dues as a condition of employment -- are merely the prey of the parasitical goons.

The National Legal and Policy Center's "Union Corruption Update" regularly highlights specific instances of extraordinary thievishness among Big Labor's top goons. But since the entire enterprise of organized labor thievery is a dishonest extortion racket, it is thus absurd to reserve the adjective "corrupt" for those union officials who steal a little more than the law allows.

Obama defies the Wayback Machine

Team Obama tries to hide the evidence of St. Hopey's erstwhile opposition to the surge in Iraq:

Barack Obama's campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop "surge" in Iraq, the Daily News has learned.
The presumed Democratic nominee replaced his Iraq issue Web page, which had described the surge as a "problem" that had barely reduced violence. "The surge is not working," Obama's old plan stated, citing a lack of Iraqi political cooperation but crediting Sunni sheiks - not U.S. military muscle - for quelling violence in Anbar Province.
The News reported Sunday that insurgent attacks have fallen to the fewest since March 2004. (Emphasis added.)

This childish and impotent gesture won't work, as anyone familiar with Internet technology could tell you. The old stuff can still be found through Google caches, and No Quarter has some of the Messiah's former prophecies of doom in Iraq. Don Surber:

Finally, we know what Obama means by change.

Yeah, Don, but what the hell is the Hope for?

UPDATE: Scott Johnson alludes to Orwell:

Who is heading up the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth over at the Obama campaign?

This constant under-the-bus stuff -- now Obama's thrown his own former anti-war self under the bus -- indeed begins to resemble the facile rewriting of history that Orwell's 1984 portrayed as inherent to totalitarianism, e.g., Stalin's henchmen airbrushing Trotsky from old photos, the coverup of the Comintern's role in the failure of the anti-fascist opposition in Spain, et cetera.

Ed Morrisey questions the timing:

The move comes as John McCain repeatedly points out that Obama opposed the surge in January 2007 and said it would make the situation worse. . . .
The scrubbing . . . may just be a way to prep for his upcoming trip to Iraq. If Obama appeared before the troops who defeated the terrorists in western Iraq, he may not get the reception he wants if his website kept discounting their hard work in the face of a despicable enemy.

Yeah, you can see Obama (who, unlike John Kerry, never wore the uniform) going to Iraq and telling the troops: "Congratulations on your complete failure in this futile doomed quagmire!"

RWFG on 'Gonzo'

Victor Morton, the Right-Wing Film Geek, reviews Gonzo:

Former work colleague Stacy and I went to see GONZO together last week, in part so he could review it for the American Spectator. I have long known that Stacy loves Hunter S. Thompson and had written several times for the newspaper on him, so I figured he’d get a kick about at least seeing GONZO. . . .
The nub of Stacy's complaint was that the film was too heavily focused on Thompson's political involvement in "the Sixties," and thus skrimped heavily on large chunks of material, both from earlier and later.

My review in The American Spectator was a bit harsh, because Alex Gibney's film to a large degree reflects the narrative that Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner has spun since Thompson's death, that the only really important work of HST's career was what he wrote for Rolling Stone. Wenner especially discounts Thompson's later writing, including his columns for ESPN.com.

This notion of the great Gonzo in his final years as irrelevant was personally hurtful to Thompson's widow, Anita, who worked with Hunter on the ESPN columns. As she told the New York Daily News, Hunter "wrote more in the final five years of his life than he did in the previous 15 years of his life."

Gibney makes one major concession to Thompson's post-Rolling Stone career, by beginning the film with a re-enactment of HST writing his post-9/11 column for ESPN:

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. . . .
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

Very good -- the column is read by Johnny Depp, who functions as the voice of Thompson's writing for much of the film. But Gibney obviously chooses this column for the opening scene because it fits his own Bush-hating, anti-war worldview. Thompson matters, Gibney is saying, because Thompson was a man of the Left.

No, Thompson matters because he was a brilliant writer, one of the most creative writers of the 20th century, the inventor of a style that has been often imitated but never equalled. He is admired by so many journalists -- not all of them on the Left -- because, more than any other writer, Thompson conveyed the sense of journalism as fun.

Every reporter who has ever given that spontaneous air-punch of triumph -- yes! -- after hanging up the phone with a source that just gave him the quote that cinched the big story knows the Thompsonesque thrill of journalism as a rollicking good-time adventure. When I first met his widow last fall, she explained one common misconception about Thompson:

"A lot of young people are under the assumption that if you do a lot of cocaine and drink a lot of Wild Turkey, you, too, can write like Hunter S. Thompson."

You don't have to gobble mescaline and guzzle whiskey to be gonzo, you just need to conceive of journalism as a grand sport, a competitive excursion in search of the Big Story. (Ask Philip Klein about how I scooped him with his own notes while he lounged in the hot tub in Santa Barbara.)

Go back and re-read Hell's Angels, as I recently did, and you'll see that Thompson repeatedly excoriates other reporters (from Time, the Associated Press and the rest of the same MSM outlets that we all still hate today) for publishing stories filled with inaccuracies, hype and "official bulls--t," stories that failed to accurately describe who the Angels were, what they did, and why they did it.

Thompson's account went deeper, told a bigger and more interesting truth, and debunked the press hysteria that depicted the Angels -- a relative handful of Harley-riding hoodlums in California -- as a ubiquitous Menace to Society who might, at any moment, swoop down on your Middle American town and gang-rape your daughter.

Thompson got the Real Story, in other words, and thereby exposed as gullible chumps the big-shot Professional Journalists with their precious "objectivity" and "ethics." One can almost hear Hunter shouting: "Objectivity, my ass! How about some facts for a change?" That was the brilliance of Thompson as a journalist, and it is admirable without regard for the narrow lens of left-wing politics through which Gibney insists on telling Thompson's story.

Victor fairly well enjoyed the Gibney film (rating it a 6 on his 10-point scale) and points out that my own deep familiarity with the gonzo syllabus probably accounts for most of my dissatisfaction with the film. I didn't mean to tell anyone not to go see the film, which certainly delivers enough fun in two hours to justify the cost of a $9 ticket and a box of popcorn. I just didn't want anyone to go see it without the caveats.

If you want to know Hunter S. Thompson, read his books. But I guess it's the old story -- if you've read the book, you'll always be somewhat disappointed with the movie version.

At any rate, I owe Victor for a couple of beers and a plate of quesadillas. But considering that I introduced Victor to Ann Coulter, the balance sheet's probably still in my favor.

An odd thing

I never heard of David Benkof until today, when I learned he'd suddenly decided to abandon his blog (GaysDefendMarriage.com) and disassociate himself from the Proposition 8 campaign in California. His cryptic last post:

It is with great sadness that I announce that I feel I must withdraw from openly supporting man-woman marriage in the United States. I recently learned quite a bit of disturbing information that makes it impossible for me to continue supporting a movement I no longer respect. I have not yet decided when or even if I will write about why I’m ending my participation in this debate.
I’d like to thank Maggie Gallagher of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy who got me started with blogging at MarriageDebate.com and encouraged me to create my own blog, which ultimately became GaysDefendMarriage.com. I’d also like to thank the dozens of commenters, both those who agree with me and those who disagree, who have made this Web site a true place of conversation rather than just another pro-man-woman-marriage site.
In case you’re wondering:
1) I do not advocate that people give time or money to the Proposition 8 campaign in California.
2) People should vote their consciences on the ballot measure. I’m not a California voter, but if I was, I’d probably hold my nose and vote yes, though I can’t be sure.
Have a good summer, everyone!
-David Benkof

I have no idea what scandalous discovery caused Benkof to decide to pull the plug. In a message to a pro-gay site, Benkof said:

"I no longer feel comfortable being allied with the people running the Prop. 8 campaign, and the same-sex marriage movement in America in general, with a few exceptions - most notably Maggie Gallagher. I have made a tentative decision not to publicize the disturbing information that caused me to end my promotion of man-woman marriage in the United States. But there is very little that I know about those subjects that a journalist, blogger, or activist cannot find out through diligent googling and asking the right questions of the Prop. 8 campaign."

Which suggests to me that it's some action by the activists behind the ballot initiative that Benkof is protesting. Benkof appears to be a relative newcomer to political activism, and a True Believer type motivated by idealism. It might be that whatever "disturbing information" he's protesting is the kind of thing that wouldn't really shock someone who's been around politics long enough to become accustomed to the extreme cynicism of that nasty racket. But it's curious that he would go out of his way in his farewell to praise Maggie Gallagher, who remains committed to the movement that Benkof suddenly finds untenable.

Unhelpful advice

Just what we need -- Harvard whiz-kid Ross Douthat to tell us "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream."

Yeah, Ross is the GOP's answer to Mudcat, offering up pithy insights into proletarian politics based on his hardscrabble upbringing on the mean streets of New Haven and Cambridge.

I'm thinking of my next book: I've Got Ties Older Than You: Now Shut Up and Get Me a Cup of Coffee, Kid.

Too clever by half

One of the favorite tricks of political writers is to seize on some analogy that seems clever, pick only the evidence that supports the comparison, ignore contradictory evidence, and then bask in the glow of their own cleverness. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you John Heileman:

Feel free to tell me I'm nuts for asking the question, but doesn’t it seem that,
more and more, the McCain campaign is turning into the Clinton campaign? . . .

(You're nuts. Hey, you said, "feel free" . . .)

Yet it's hard not to see the similarities between the chaos afflicting McCain-land now and what went on in Clinton-world during the primaries. In the former, like the latter, you have an outfit with no clear lines of authority, rife with elephantine egos and feuding factions that have been at each other's throats for years, none with the slightest compunction about bearing their animosities (albeit anonymously) in the press. And in McCain, like Clinton, you have a candidate who not only tolerates but seems to encourage an atmosphere of anarchy -- and who finds it difficult to fire anyone, no matter how incompetent.

There is a world of difference between the the candidates and their campaigns. Hillary came into the campaign with higher negative ratings than Charles Manson, yet was considered the inevitable nominee. She ran a front-runner's campaign, put a pollster (Mark Penn) in charge of her team, failed to organize effectively in caucus states and didn't make organizational changes until it was too late to affect the outcome.

John McCain, who was counted out of the GOP primary contest a year ago, managed a comeback that parlayed three early primary victories (in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida) into an impression of invincibility, causing his strongest rival, Mitt Romney, to call it quits in February.

While it could easily be argued that the McCain campaign did nothing much in ensuing months to capitalize on that early knockout punch -- e.g., if they've organized at the grassroots, they did so without anyone noticing -- they now seem to be catching up in fund-raising, at least, and recent polls indicate a dead heat, despite the media's Obamamania and the "enthusiasm gap" among Republicans.

The recent shakeup at McCain HQ comes six weeks ahead of the traditional Labor Day kickoff of the general election campaign, and there's still plenty of time for further staff changes before the real serious hammering gets underway.

But here's the big flaw in Heileman's analogy: A general election is not a primary campaign. There are no caucus states (where Obama's organizational superiority trumped Hillary) and there are no "superdelegates" to be wooed (it is only because of superdelegate endorsements that Obama can claim the Democratic nomination).

Most importantly, in the general election campaign, McCain will benefit from the activities of surrogates. The NRA has announced plans to unload $40 million against Obama. The vaunted "Republican attack machine" -- talk radio, Fox News, Matt Drudge -- will swing into action, amplifying every Obama miscue and gaffe.

Liberals seem to forget the role that Drudge and other conservatives played in damaging Hillary in the early stages of the primary campaign, for instance amplifying her October blunder on drivers licenses for illegals. But by mid-March, as soon as Obama appeared to have the nomination locked up, the "attack machine" switched sides, with Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" helping Clinton to fight it out to the end.

There's no need to wonder why Obama's post-clinch "bounce" proved small and of short duration -- the "attack machine" and Operation Chaos had been softening him up for two months. It's pretty clear that cheerleaders like Heineman have underestimated Obama's unreadiness to face the "attack machine." Here's a clue: Let Hopey make some impromptu gaffe with the European press during next week's Grand Tour and see how quickly that mushrooms into a Eagleton-style crisis.

Back in 2004, I remember listening to Limbaugh one day when one of his callers complained that Bush never seemed to attack liberals directly. Rush replied, "He doesn't have to -- that's what I'm here for."

That's a point worth keeping in mind as this campaign develops. John McCain has obvious limitations as a candidate and the shortcomings of his campaign organization may be very real, but one thing the Republican nominee doesn't have to worry about is his attack message. Conservative talk radio reaches an audience numbered in the tens of millions, and a single banner headline by Matt Drudge can make TV news producers jump out of their chairs.

If there's anything we learned during the Democratic primary campaign it's that when Obama's off-script and under pressure -- remember that April 15 debate in Philadelphia? -- he's a one-man gaffe factory. And if there's anything we know about the GOP "attack machine," they're experts at making Democrats suffer for that kind of stuff. All it takes is one little goof and Obama will find himself morphed into a Walter Mondale clone.

So let John Heineman go ahead and break his arm patting himself on the back for his clever analogy. I remind him that Dukakis was ahead by 17 points in July 1988, and Bush 41 was scarcely a more appealing candidate than John McCain.

Sarah Silverman, available

If you like 'em smart, sarcastic and zaftig -- and let's face it, who doesn't? -- she's on the market again:

Late night host Jimmy Kimmel and comic Sarah Silverman have called it quits after five years of dating, reps for the couple confirm to Usmagazine.com.
The break up was mutual, a source says.
"Jimmy and Sarah will have no further comment," their reps Lewis Kay and Amy Zvi tell Us in a statement.

No comment so far from Matt Damon.

UPDATE: Also no comment from Ben Affleck.

Liberals attempt satire, fail

Every blogger on the planet has spent the day having conniptions over the cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker:

Michelle Obama in an Angela Davis-style 'Fro, with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, Obama in Arab-type garb, a flag burning in the Oval Office fireplace with a picture of Osama bin Laden over the mantle.

New Yorker editor David Remnick endeavors to explain that this is an artistic effort to "hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about" Obama "that have been propagated . . . on the right . . . about Obama's supposed 'lack of patriotism' or his being 'soft on terrorism' or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers."

In other words, Remnick meant this as a smear of Republicans, so it's OK. But the Left's official arbiters of outrage aren't buying what my old buddy Atrios calls the "Everybody Knows That They're Good Liberals So It's Satire" excuse. I'm tempted to offer specific suggestions for a counter-satire -- "Offensive Obama-Themed Cover Illustrations Rejected by David Remnick" -- but somehow I don't think Atrios would appreciate the nuanced irony.

Michelle Malkin, who's been on the receiving end of the "They're Good Liberals So It's Satire" treatment, isn't sympathetic to Obama's indignation.

UPDATE: The Good Liberals at the New Yorker have apparently diverted the Left's indignation from John McLaughlin calling Obama an "Oreo." Again, I resist the temptation to add nuanced irony.

Abortion, Inc.

The big-money reality of Planned Parenthood:



Linking this article about Planned Parenthood's "rebranding" effort to move to suburban malls, Ed Morrisey says:

[Planned Parenthood] got over $15 million [in federal taxpayer funding] in 2007 while garnering more than a billion dollars in revenues from their operations. In return, its national PAC has already raised over $250,000 for the 2008 cycle and spent $200,000 of it, and 97% of it goes to Democrats. That makes their earmarks look a lot like strawman redistribution of tax money back to the Democratic Party.

Students For Life is promoting an online petition to end taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood.

Is Obama inevitable?

My latest American Spectator column:

Evidence of conservative despair isn't hard to find nowadays in Washington."We're doomed!" one veteran communications operative of the Right exclaimed last week when I asked her to assess the current campaign. . . .
Are prospects really so bleak? Despite the dispirited state of the GOP, the ideological muddling of the McCain campaign, and the media accolades for Obama, it is far from a foregone conclusion that Hope and Change will triumph Nov. 4. . . .

Please read the whole thing. When I sent that out over Facebook this morning, a fellow journalist replied, "Hope is not a plan," and talked about the apparent lack of an anti-Obama strategy. To which I replied that I'm not a strategist (nobody's paying me for advice), but . . .

But if I were a strategist for Obama, I'd have screamed "hell, no" the minute I heard someone suggest this idiotic European trip idea. And if I were a strategist for McCain, I'm pretty sure I could come up with a way to play that trip to my candidate's advantage. Whether the actual strategists at the McCain campaign (you know, the geniuses with the six-figure salaries) see the same thing I see -- well, who knows?

Being a conservative journalist means that people feel entitled to give you grief for every stupid thing Republicans do. What I always say is, "Look, no Republican has ever asked me for advice. And every time I've volunteered advice, I've been ignored. I've got zero influence over what they do, and I'm as unhappy as you are, so don't complain to me."

If the geniuses with the six-figure salaries aren't earning their pay, that ain't my fault.

UPDATE: Philip Klein says his column about the worst-case scenario of an Obama presidency has been misinterpreted as an indifference to that possibility. I repond:

Phil, I hope I was not guilty of misrepresenting your views, but you've been in a lot of the same bull-session discussions as me, and you know that the Bright Young Minds of the Right are hardly in a panic over the prospect of an Obama presidency. If George W. Bush has been president since you were in college, and if you were in middle school when Republicans captured Congress, it is understandably difficult for you to remember what it was really like the last time Democrats controlled everything in Washington. So while I don't mean to say you've got a "who cares" attitude, a lot of your peers do have that attitude, and it's not hard to see why. . . .

Go read the rest of that, too.

When Democrats say stupid things, is global warming to blame?

Well, it causes everything else:

A top Democrat told high school students gathered at the U.S. Capitol Thursday that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina and the conflict in Darfur, which led to the "black hawk down" battle between U.S. troops and Somali rebels.
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House (Select) Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, also equated the drive for global warming legislation with the drive for women's suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. . . .
"In Somalia back in 1993, climate change, according to 11 three- and four-star generals, resulted in a drought which led to famine," said Markey. "That famine translated to international aid we sent in to Somalia, which then led to the U.S. having to send in forces to separate all the groups that were fighting over the aid, which led to Black Hawk Down. . . ."
Markey was speaking to 25 students from the World Wildlife Fund's Allianz Southeast Climate Witness Program. The students had come to the Capitol to brief members of Congress on the risks of global warming.

Henceforth, any Democrat who blames global warming for something utterly random will be diagnosed with Markey Syndrome.

BTW, does Markey mean to suggest that women's suffrage is unquestionably a good thing?

Obama's bounceless summer

UPDATED & BUMPED: Today's Gallup daily tracking poll has Obama by three, 46-43%:

Today marks the 14th straight Gallup Poll Daily tracking report in which 46% to 48% of voters favor Obama, and between 42% and 44% favor McCain. This narrow zone has given Obama a continuous, but fairly slim, lead over the two-week period.

Meanwhile, Rasmussen's daily tracking poll reports a 43-43% tie for the second straight day.

PREVIOUSLY: Despite adulatory press coverage, Barack Obama's support still hovers in the 40s. The latest Gallup daily tracking poll has him up 47-43%:

The current figures, based on July 9-11 polling, exactly match the averages for each candidate over the past two weeks of Gallup Poll Daily tracking. During this time, Obama's support has ranged between 46% and 48% in each three-day rolling average, while McCain's has registered between 42% and 44%.

Chris Matthews Syndrome is not yet a pandemic.

'Fast Eddie' Morrissey

When I got on the McCain campaign's conference call this afternoon, I didn't realize that Ed Morrissey of Hot Air was also on the call.

Ed actually got his version of the conference call online 7 minutes faster than I did, which is pretty doggone impressive. I'm pretty quick at whipping together spot news, and it's not often I get beat -- even by 7 minutes -- when I'm in a hurry. So, a big hat-tip to Capt. Ed.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah, the conference call. Former U.S. Treasure Rosario Marin said, basically, that Obama would tell the National Council of La Raza that McCain has changed his position on shamnesty open borders immigration reform. Not true, according to Marin. The "border security first" position is just a precursor to implementing the whole enchilada of guest workers and amnesty for illegals. Or, at least that's what I took her to mean when she said, "He will do it in steps."

I never got to ask my question, which was, "Is there really any point in a Republican getting into a pandering competition with a Democrat?"

Corrupt Democrats? Yawn

The indictment of several Democratic legislative aides in a Pennsylvania corruption scandal elicits this hopeful thought from Ed Morrisey:

This comes at a very bad time for Democrats. They need to hold Pennsylvania in November if they want to win the Presidency, but a massive corruption scandal makes that a lot less likely. . . . [T]his could tip the Keystone State into the red column for 2008 — and possibly several more cycles beyond that.

Sorry, Ed, you're wrong. Having co-authored an entire book on the Democratic Party's history of corruption, I can tell you that people who vote Democrat don't care how crooked the Democrats are. You don't vote for the party of Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton if you care about honesty in government.

The Democratic Party's something-for-nothing ethic -- the thievish and corrupting notion that people are entitled to government benefits paid for by other people's taxes -- renders the party scandal-proof. Oh, sure, Democrats pretend to be upset when Republicans are caught in scandalous behavior. But their phony outrage merely hides their glee at the prospect of ousting a Republican, so they can elect more Democrats, so they can vote themselves more "free" government benefits.

If the people of Pennsylvania cared about corruption, they would never have elected as their governor Ed Rendell, boss of the notorious Philadelphia machine. Republicans therefore cannot benefit politically from a Democratic scandal in Pennsylvania, because it is the voters themselves who are the source of the corruption.

It is foolish to expect public officials to uphold standards of morality that their constituents routinely disregard. How is the politician who lines his pockets from embezzled funds any worse than the man who joins a corrupt labor union? (Of course, all labor unions are corrupt.) How is a crooked government employee worse than someone who votes for Democrats in hopes of getting more taxpayer-funded benefits? It's theft either way, and calling it "progressive social policy" doesn't make it moral.

Juan La Raza McCain

Trying to outpander Obama:

Barack Obama takes the podium at the National Council of La Raza/The Race tonight. John McCain will Hispander, as Mickey Kaus puts it so well, tomorrow.
It’ll be an open-borders lovefest for Obama, who was championed yesterday at The Race conference by L.A.'s zealous pro-illegal immigration mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa. . . .
As for McCain’s appearance tomorrow, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review calls it "the biggest mistake of his 2008 presidential run."

He wasn't born here. Is it too late to deport him?

UPDATE: Selling out conservative values? No, it's a "centrist shift," says the L.A. Times.

The lows get higher

While checking the stats on SiteMeter (currently averaging 1,400+ visitors daily), I noticed that I've only had four days with less than 500 visitors in the past month.

Peak traffic is always dependent on getting linked by the biggies, the real trick to increasing the average is to build "residual" traffic -- people visiting posts from weeks or months ago that they've found via Google searches or older links on other sites. So even on days when traffic's slow and nobody's linking, you still get a relatively steady stream of visitors -- the lows get higher.

One key to residual traffic? Celebrities. I do the occasional "celebrity update" just to keep from boring people to death with all-politics, all-the-time, and these posts -- about Natalie Portman, Britney Spears, Lindsday Lohan, Keira Knightley, Ann Hathaway -- bring visitors to the site day after day.

BTW, did you hear that Hollywood starlet and former Vogue covergirl Sienna Miller, 26, is having an affair with Balthazar Getty, who is 33, married and has four kids? Shameful. Almost as shameful as Sienna being photographed topless, kissing Getty on his boat near the Italian coast. Despite all the wealth and fame of my fabulous blogging career, never once have I been tempted to kiss a starlet on my boat near the Italian coast.

Barr slams Obama

On Obama's "national service" plan:

"Americans are among the most generous people on the planet and excel at serving one another," says Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate.
"Unfortunately, Sen. Barack Obama wants to turn service into a government requirement" by forcing middle, high school, and college students to work in federally approved jobs. "But service must be an outgrowth of the heart to be life-changing for both parties. It isn't possible to mandate generosity or coerce compassion," Barr explains.
Moreover, "it certainly isn't Washington's responsibility to dictate to every middle school, high school, and college across America the sort of activities they should require of their students," notes Barr. “If local school boards and college presidents believe mandatory service to be a good idea, they can -- as many have done -- make it a graduation requirement. There's no justification for the federal government to set a national standard."

Mandatory generosity? Coercive compassion? That's the kind of "Hope" we can do without.

Cynthia McKinney wins Green Party nomination

Adding an extra dose of crazy to the presidential campaign:

The liberal environmentalist Green Party nominated former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney as its presidential candidate Saturday.
McKinney, 53, held off three rivals to win the party's nomination during its convention in Chicago, Illinois. . . .
First elected in 1992, she lost a primary challenge in 2002 after suggesting in a radio interview that members of the Bush administration stood to profit from the war that followed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. In 2004 she ran again and won with a low-key campaign in which she largely avoided controversy. But voters ousted her again in 2006 after she was accused of a physical altercation with a U.S. Capitol Police officer who questioned her after failing to recognize her at a security checkpoint.

She joins fellow Georgian Bob Barr in the presidential field. (BTW, the fundraising ticker at Barr's Web site is now nearing $450,000.) Time magazine has a feature about Barr who "could conceivably Naderize John McCain in a few key states." The Time story has a Nevada dateline.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

UPDATE: Politico says the GOP is ignoring Barr:

If Republicans are worried about the third-party presidential candidacy of former GOP Rep. Bob Barr and the possibility that he could win enough votes to affect the outcome in several states, they aren't showing it.
At present there are no plans to follow the time-honored method of dealing with pesky third-party candidates by seeking to knock Barr off various state ballots. Indeed, when asked for comment about the Barr campaign, John McCain's campaign flat out declined to offer one. . . .
If McCain's campaign, or anyone acting on his behalf, does challenge Barr's ballot access, Barr's campaign believes they would have a powerful argument that the Republican would be acting hypocritically and they are optimistic he will not do so for that reason.
"I remember when McCain was locked out of the New York ballot in the 2000 primary," said Russell Verney, Barr's campaign manager. “He eventually sued the state and said the people deserved a choice. I don't think he'll go back on his word and will tell his activists to refrain from denying people a choice."

Hmmmm.

PUMA update

Andrea Shea King has an interview with Will Bower, co-founder of the dissident Democratic group PUMA/Just Say No Deal:

Nearly 18 million people voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential primaries and many of them believe their candidate was cheated out of being the Democratic nominee for president.
Now more than two million, based on donation and other records, are determined to protest the nominating process and push for an open convention in Denver this August. . . .
"We said we are not falling in line just because Obama and (David) Axelrod and the DNC were saying 'All right, this is over, let's all get behind Barack Obama.' There are plenty of us out here saying, 'No this is not over. You have treated us very unfairly and in fact, anti-democratically,'" he said. . . .
"CNN did a poll at the beginning of June that showed 1 of every 5 Clinton supporters would not vote for Obama. Well, just one month later that's now 1 in 3. So we're getting our numbers up and we're growing strong. And if the DNC's not worried about us, then they're clueless as to this movement."

A lot of people have underestimated the Clintons' ability -- or their will -- to cause havoc within the Democratic Party if she was denied the nomination. Part of the reason was that the media tended to portray Obama as the only candidate with enthusiastic grassroots supporters. Bower and the PUMA crowd are a reminder that there still are Hillary fans out there, and that they represent a potential source of trouble for Obama and the DNC.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

The Best Defense

Armed mom chases off two intruders:

Hunley, who is 5-foot-3, emptied her handgun, firing four shots at the intruder. The gunman ran out the front door. Neither Hunley nor her daughter were hurt during the exchange of gunfire.

Robert Waters (who lives in Ocala) will no doubt save this story for his next sequel to The Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves With a Firearm.

(Via Hot Air Headlines.)

U.N. vetoes Zimbabwe sanctions

China and Russia exercise their veto in the Security Council:

British and US efforts to apply punitive pressure on Robert Mugabe were abruptly undermined last night when Russia and China vetoed a UN security council resolution seeking sanctions against Zimbabwe.
The resolution, calling for an arms embargo, and financial and travel restrictions on Mugabe and 13 other regime leaders, was backed by nine nations but foundered on the vetoes of the two permanent members. The arms embargo would have affected Russian and Chinese weapons exporters.

While detesting the self-interested supporters of tyranny in Russia and China, I have to wonder what purpose would have been served by sanctions. After all, what influence could economic sanctions have on a thug like Mugabe who has already willfully destroyed his own nation's economy?

It's a sad commentary that the United States, which has spent hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to overthrow the Saddam regime in Iraq, won't lift a finger to save Zimbabwe from Mugabe, a dictator so thievish and brutal as to make Saddam look like a Boy Scout. One wonders why Barack Obama doesn't make an issue of the Bush administration's indifference to the suffering caused by Mugabe's criminal despotism.

Chuck Schumer's bank run

Blamed for the IndyMac debacle:

The immediate cause of the closing was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Senator Charles Schumer of New York. The letter expressed concerns about IndyMac’s viability. In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts.

The L.A. Times:

Schumer's response? In an e-mail quoted by Bloomberg News, he says: "If OTS had done its job as regulator and not let IndyMac's poor and loose lending practices continue, we wouldn't be where we are today ... Instead of pointing false fingers of blame, OTS should start doing its job to prevent future IndyMacs.''

Guess he got tired of sabotaging the troops in Iraq and decided to apply his skills on the domestic front.

A Democratic landslide?

Don Surber notes that Republicans are "raising the roof and raking it in" in terms of campaign fundraising, despite the general consensus among pundits that this will be a banner year for Democrats. The British Guardian reports:

John McCain, is attracting millions more dollars in funding than expected, which could allow him to match the much-vaunted Barack Obama donation machine. . . .
McCain surprised US political pundits by raising $22 [million] in June, his best showing since he launched his bid for the White House early last year.
Obama remains favourite to win the election, with polls showing him on average five points ahead, but McCain is showing increasing signs of making a fight of it in spite of his lacklustre campaign so far.

It so happens that I'm writing a column on the existential gloom that has taken hold among many conservatives about this year's election. Philip Klein's column contemplating an Obama presidency may or may not be evidence of defeatism, but certainly many conservatives have little hope that McCain can win.

In fact, many conservatives don't want McCain to win. They didn't support him in the primaries, and view the possibility of a McCain presidency with fear and loathing. But that doesn't mean that McCain can't win, or that there would be no benefit from the defeat of Hope.

The first step to winning, of course, is the belief that victory is possible. Many Republicans seem to have allowed themselves to be demoralized by the incessant drumbeat from the media that portrays Obama as an inevitable winner in November. Yet occasionally news leaks out to the contrary:

[I]n May, when Obama's victory seemed inevitable, some 115 former Clinton donors made substantial contributions to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona, according to an analysis done by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics for the Wall Street Journal. And, disgruntled Clinton supporters have put up Internet sites in protest, such as Together4us.com.

As little cause as conservatives might have to hope for a McCain victory in November, it remains a possibility, and perhaps my fellow right-wingers can at least appreciate the purely mean-spirited spite of breaking the Democrats' hearts.

UPDATE: Rusty links, but doesn't seem really convinced.