From politics (moderates who lean to the right) to Pogo (drools during poker stare) to rants (Whatcha expect from savvy, sassy sexagenarians?) to raves (Have you had your kudo today?) -- we never take ourselves too seriously.
We do, however, reserve the right to slaughter an occasional sacred cow. And in case we fail to mention it -- we will never forget....
The Over-the-Hill bloggers group (see blog roll in sidebar) is gearing up for a sprint to November 4!!! We're gonna be doing our bestest to show our united support of John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Anyone having suggestions is invited to comment below .....
Most likely -- had I been offered a ticket to the extravaganza in Denver, I would have attended. Had I been given a flag, I would have accepted it. I wouldn't, however, have tossed it away.
And nor should have the democrats.
Fortunately, a clean-up contractor salvaged approximately 12,000 US flags from dumpsters at the stadium and the democrat convention center last week.
Here's what the same flags look like when held by citizens attending a rally for McCain-Palin in Colorado Springs today:
Less than a month ago, the Public Editor of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, addressed his paper's failure to cover the John Edwards "love child" story until after Edwards' interview with ABC News, in which he confessed to the Rielle Hunter affair. Hoyt explained that this kind of story just isn't up the Times' alley:
I do not think liberal bias had anything to do with it. But I think The Times — like The Washington Post, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, major networks and wire services — was far too squeamish about tackling the story. ...
It is ... the kind of story that The Times seems instinctively to recoil from, just as it ignored such stories in its own backyard as A-Rod and Madonna and Christie Brinkley’s ugly divorce, and played down the “love child” scandal involving New York City’s only Republican congressman, Vito Fossella, earlier this year. ...
Edwards-Hunter was “classically not a Times-like story,” said Craig Whitney, the standards editor.
That's not all: the Times has limited resources to cover the Presidential campaign, and it has to devote itself to the stories that are really important:
“Edwards isn’t a player at the moment,” said Richard Stevenson, who directs the newspaper’s campaign coverage. “There are a lot of big issues facing the country. The two candidates are compelling figures, and we have finite resources.” He said he agreed that Edwards was “fair game for journalism of this sort, but this hasn’t seemed to me to be a high priority for us at this moment.”
Today, the Times has three front-page stories about Bristol Palin. It's nice to see that they've gotten over that squeamish feeling. Seems like we've learned something about their priorities, too.
She's a maverick from Alaska. She's also the woman who is likely to be the first female Vice President of the United States.
There will be much written about her in the coming days .... In the coming days and weeks, she will become as much as a household name in the lower-48 as she is in her state of Alaska.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is a God-fearing, gun-toting former beauty queen who could just become America's next vice president.
In Alaska, the right to bear arms means staying on top of the food chain. Palin, a lifelong member of the National Rifle Association, hunts, shoots, and fishes.
Husband Todd holds a commercial fishing license for salmon. In the mid-1990s, when Todd got a job working on Alaska's North Slope, Palin decided to occupy herself by becoming mayor of Wasilla, the state's fastest-growing community.
As mayor, she gradually grew frustrated with Alaska's "good ol' boy" style of governance -- so she decided to do something about it. She ran for governor in 2006 and won, defeating popular former Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles.
Palin's victory made her Alaska's first female chief executive, and its youngest.
Now, many insiders believe this 44-year-old mother of five would add a strong conservative presence to the GOP ticket.
Palin tells Newsmax that it's high time Congress allows the development of Alaska's wealth of oil and gas. She doubts global warming stems from human activity, and she considers herself both a fiscal and social conservative.
Are you open to running as McCain's vice president?
Palin: I have so much on my plate as governor, it's hard to even imagine such an offer. I would just have to cross that bridge when it comes.
What do you think of McCain's chances, and what should he and the GOP do to win in November?
I believe John McCain will be our next president. To win, he needs to continue his message that America needs leadership devoted to the public interest -- not the special interest. The GOP needs to live the planks of its platform, not just offer lip service.
How did you pull off your election victory as governor?
Alaska was ready for a positive change and tired of the good ol' boy network. It caused many Alaskans to lose faith in their government. People want faith in their government. I have been able to pass a comprehensive reform law and place the state's checkbook online. You can be a reformer and also be a conservative.
And your stand on abortion?
I'm pro-life. I'll do all I can to see every baby is created with a future and potential. The legislature should do all it can to protect human life.
Politically, how would you describe yourself?
Fiscally and socially, I am a conservative. My respect for the three different branches of government and the balance between them has been my guide.
If you were running for president, what causes would you champion?
I would push for a strong military and a sound energy policy. I believe that Alaska can help set an example on energy policy.
Speaking of energy, how much oil and gas does America really have?
We have billions and billions of barrels of oil and trillions of feet of natural gas. We have so much potential from tapping our resources here in Alaska. And we can do this with minimum environmental impact. We have a very pro-development president in President Bush, and yet he failed to push for opening up parts of Alaska to drilling through Congress -- and a Republican-controlled Congress, I might add.
I thought when we hit $100 a barrel for oil it would have been a psychological barrier that would have caused Congress to reconsider, but they didn't. Now we are approaching $200 a barrel. It's nonsense not to tap a safe domestic source of oil. I think Americans need to hold Congress accountable on this one.
What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?
A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.
Something tells me Biden and the Washington establishment better get ready for a Barracuda in the House ....
Last Saturday, America heard Mr. Obama's new running mate exclaim, "I watch with amazement as he came to the Senate. I watch with amazement!" Mr. Biden's hyperkinetic praise is what we expect a running mate to offer his benefactor at the top of the ticket.
But Saturday and again Wednesday night, Mr. Biden also praised Mr. Obama for three specific legislative accomplishments. One of them was an ethics bill, called by Mr. Biden in his acceptance speech "the most sweeping in a generation." However, many critics--including Hillary Clinton--criticized it as weak. For example, under Mr. Obama's bill, lobbyists may buy politicians meals if they are eating standing up but not if they're sitting down. Mr. Obama's bill didn't ban privately funded travel for congressmen or authorize an independent investigation office. But Mr. Obama did help draft, negotiate, and push the legislation that passed. The other two supposed accomplishments are more problematic.
Saturday, Mr. Biden asserted Mr. Obama "made his mark literally from day one, reaching across the aisle to pass legislation to secure the world's deadliest weapons," a claim similar to one Mr. Obama made earlier in the campaign. Wednesday night, Mr. Biden was more expansive, claiming Mr. Obama was a leader "to pass a law that helps keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists." This implied a big, important controversial measure, passed with difficulty after the intervention of an extraordinary leader.
In reality, the Lugar-Obama Bill was passed on a voice vote on December 11, 2006. It was so routine, there was no recorded vote. The media didn't consider it important or controversial. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported its Senate passage, though the Post ran a 798-word op-ed by Senators Lugar and Obama the week before it was approved. It was not the subject of a story on the CBS, ABC or NBC evening news--not when it passed, not when it was signed, not ever. No story about it appeared in Roll Call or The Hill, the daily newspapers that cover the minutiae of Congress. It drew only one squib in Congressional Quarterly--and that story didn't mention Obama, just Lugar. The Bush administration supported it. The legislation required the administration to report to Congress within 180 days "on proliferation and interdiction assistance" to secure the mostly conventional weapons stocks littering the nations born from the collapsed Soviet empire. It created a new State Department office to support the Bush administration's "Proliferation Security Initiative" aimed at interdicting weapons of mass destruction and conventional weaponry. And the bill authorized $110 million in funding. But this legislation didn't require a profile in courage to co-sponsor or hard work and powerful persuasion to pass, as Mr. Biden implied.
Saturday, Biden proclaimed: "But I was proudest, I was proudest, when I watched him spontaneously focus the attention of the nation on the shameful neglect of America's wounded warriors at Walter Reed Army Hospital." The problem for Mr. Biden (and the object of his praise, Mr. Obama) is the problems at Walter Reed were revealed in articles in the Washington Post, starting February 18, 2007. Unless Mr. Obama writes for the Washington Post under the nom de media of Anne Hull or Dana Priest, he didn't "spontaneously focus the attention of the nation." The two reporters did. The legislation to correct the shortcomings emerged from a Senate committee Mr. Obama doesn't serve on and he played no significant role in drafting or pushing it through the legislative. Mr. Obama is not the real hero of the Walter Reed turn-around, despite Mr. Biden's extravagant claims.
Like Mr. Biden, Michelle Obama's speechwriter could not resist hyping her husband's work. Monday night, Mrs. Obama talked about "what he's done in the United States Senate, fighting to ensure that the men and women who serve this country are welcomed home not just with medals and parades, but with good jobs and benefits and health care--including mental health care." This is an apparent reference to the Dignity For Wounded Warriors Act, a bill Mr. Obama introduced that never made it out of the Senate Armed Services Committee, despite its Democratic majority. Americans missed the spectacle of Mr. Obama "fighting to ensure" because he was missing for that particular battle. And if he was fighting, he must have been ineffectual because fellow Democrats didn't think this bill was worth passing.
Let’s start with the Soviet Union. We talked with the Soviet Union because they also had nuclear weapons. Obama seems to forget that the entire point of our Iran policy is to prevent being put in the position of having to cut deals with a terrorist-supporting, radical Islamist non-rational state. When the enemy already has the capability of destroying you several times over, negotiations are needed to keep one side from initiating a war. Only an idiot would think that the negotiations intended on disarming the Soviets, or they us. The same dynamic applies to our engagement with Mao Zedong and Red China; Mao was smart enough to hold himself out as a potential partner in a power balance against the Soviets.
The Soviet Union collapsed economically; they did not just decide to capitulate. The Berlin Wall did not fall as a result of negotiations, but because the regime propping it up ceased to exist. Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Because Ronald Reagan won an economic war with Moscow, forcing it to spend more and more and falling further and further behind. The Strategic Defense Initiative provided the coup de grace to the Soviets, who knew they could never match us in missile defense, and tried negotiating an end to the economic war instead, with disastrous results.
That would be the same SDI that Democrats staunchly opposed, sneeringly called “Star Wars” and proclaiming it a threat to peaceful coexistence. They wanted a decades-long series of summits instead of the end of communism, which sounds strikingly familiar in Obama’s speech. Reagan had to fight the Democrats to beat the Soviets, not through presidential-level diplomacy but through economic isolation and military strength.
Listen to Obama talk about the “common interests” supposedly shared between the US and the Iranian mullahcracy. What interests would those be? The destruction of Israel, the denial of the Holocaust, the financial and military support of Hamas and Hezbollah, or the killing of American soldiers in Iraq? And please point out the presidential-level, unconditional contacts that brought down the Berlin Wall. Our “common interests” didn’t exist between the East German and American governments; they existed between the people of East Germany and America in the promise of real freedom. When the Soviet power structure imploded, it was the people of East Germany who tore down the wall, not Mikhail Gorbachev, who watched it happen impotently.
Furthermore, the danger in Iranian nuclear weapons has nothing to do with the capacity of its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Iran’s sponsorship of terrorist organizations will allow them to partner with any small group of lunatics who want to smuggle a nuclear weapon into any Western city — London, Rome, Washington DC, Los Angeles, take your pick. That’s the problem with nuclear proliferation; it doesn’t take a large army to threaten annihilation any longer, which is why we work so hard to keep those weapons out of the hands of non-rational actors like Iran. The Soviets may have been evil, but they were rational, and we could count on their desire to survive to rely on the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. The Iranians believe that a worldwide conflagration will have Allah deliver the world to Islam, so a nuclear exchange may fall within their policy, and that’s assuming we could establish their culpability for a sneak nuclear attack to the extent where a President Obama would order a nuclear reprisal.
This speech reveals Obama to have no grasp of history, no grasp of strategic implications of a nuclear Iran, and no clue how to secure the nation and handle foreign policy.
Update: Obama suggests that Iran isn’t a real threat because they only spend “1/100th” of what we spend on defense. Not only does that make it sound like the US is a much greater threat to world peace, but it ignores the entire issue of asymmetrical warfare. How much does al-Qaeda spend on its attacks? A lot less than Iran, I’d suspect. Does that make AQ a much lower threat? If so, shouldn’t we be bombing Iran in the next five minutes or so?
If we don't defeat this man with a child's vision of the world, there will be little left to salvage of either the world or our nation.
If there were to be a litmus test for another human being, it might well be morality.
It does not bode well for one person (such as Barack Obama) to identify as his mentor an individual of questionable moral convictions.
Meet "Frank" a mentor to young Obama, as identified in Obama's autobiography, Dreams from my Father.
Closer scrutiny of the important people (that is, the poeple Obama himself identified as important) in Barack Obama's life is proving to yield what can only be called a "ick factor." Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko and Frank Marshall Davis head the list.
Frank Marshall Davis, the mentor described as "Frank" in Barack Obama's first autobiography, Dreams from my Father. Davis was not only a communist (a member of the actual Communist Party), but actually wrote about enjoying sex with teenagers, in a book authored pseudonymously. The Autonomistcites the evidence:
The Telegraph UK is reporting that Davis, a close friend of Obama's mother and his maternal grandfather, published an autobiographical, pornographic book, "Sex Rebel:Black," under the pseudonym "Bob Greene."
Marshall admitted to having written the book, which he said describes factual sexual encounters that he and his wife had with minors and other couples. "I could not then truthfully deny that this book, which came out in 1968 as a Greenleaf Classic, was mine," said Davis. The Telegraph states that, "In the introduction to Sex Rebel, Davis explains that although he has "changed names and identities...all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences."
Marshall's book describes, in lurid detail, his sexual encounters, including multiple group encounters with his wife and a 13 year old girl: "I'm not one to go in for Lolitas. Usually I'd rather not bed a babe under 20. But there are exceptions. I didn't want to disappoint the trusting child. At her still-impressionistic age, a rejection might be traumatic, could even cripple her sexually for life."
Davis described how the encounters with the child, who he called "Anne," would materialize: "Anne came up many times the next several weeks, her aunt thinking she was in good hands. Actually she was. She obtained a course in practical sex from experienced and considerate practitioners rather than from ignorant insensitive neophytes....I think we did her a favour, although the pleasure was mutual."
This is not the type of mentor the majority of Americans want to see in their President's life.
Why would a candidate promote his campaign using an obvious symbol of distress?
The DNC (distressed as well???) has responded that the campaign brochure illustrating Obama super-imposted on a flowing US flag, really "isn't a flag" .... uh huh. It's a background graphic to match the stars in his shirt????
So I'm supposed to believe I'm not seeing the "real" red and white furls above a banner of stars -- as a replica of national distress, correct? And so I'm not really seeing this graphic depiction of an inverted US flag -- as in a US flag flying upside down?
You decide.
As Capt. Ed pointed out, this "non-flag" is similar to the flag pictured on the cover of John Kerry's anti-Vietnam book.
What??? It's the same flag? But just inverted? And if the flag is presented as a (ahem) graphic, then inverting it is not a sign of distress?
Nice try.
But I don't think so.
What I do think is this depiction is not only depressing, it's distressing unto itself. It's distressing that any legitimate candidate for the Presidency of the United States would attempt to either portray his nation as distressed or use such a symbol in his campaign.
In the absence of a teleprompter, I can imagine BO's impromptu response to all of this:
"Well ... uhhh .... ummmm .... that ... that is .... ummmm .... well .... I think .... well .... you know --- uhhhh ... most Americans ... uhhhh .... that is, many Americans are ... uhhhhh .... ahem ..... Tell you what --- uhhhh ... I'll check with my graphics editor and find out if this photo has been enhanced ... uhhhhh ... it ... uhhhh .... was supposed to ... uhhhh ... match my shirt .... the ... uhhhh ... the shirt with ummmm.... the stars. Uhhhh, I think. And uhhhhh .... if ummmm .. I had known the uhhhhhh flag picture would ... uh ... cause such a commotion .... uhhhhh ... I'd uhhhhh ... have worn the ... uhhhh ... the shirt with flag poles."
