I am now the happiest woman on earth. When you marry a man with 86 wives you know he knows how to look after them.Another wife says, "As soon as I met him the headache was gone. God told me it was time to be his wife."
So we've seen the story about the idiot bail bondsman from Florida. "Man held in Fla. on charge of threatening Obama," says the story.
But you get down to paragraph six, and he apparently also told a student that he wanted to 'put a bullet in George Bush's head.'
Since when is threatening to assassinate a President not that big a deal? Much, much, less newsworthy than the fact that you also intended to maybe shoot a Senator? Since when is the threat to the Presidential candidate the headline, and the actual sitting President a very minor footnote?
That's the media space of summer 2008. Barack Obama is the news. Nothing else matters.
UPDATE: Heh. Old Bob Owens is on the task. Apparently CNN and CBS4 found the AP story too Bush-focused, and edited him out altogether.
Here's a question I'd like to ask the Obama campaign: was this just a campaign gimmick, or do you intend to push for PSAs like this if elected?
Gas Station TV, which provides video content on gas pumps around the country, decided against running an ad for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama Wednesday saying it’s decided to stay politically neutral. At the same time, however, Obama campaign staffers are telling media they believe the refusal had more to do with the content of the ads — which attacked oil companies for creating high gasoline prices — than for simply staying away from politics.So, if given the levers of power, would a President Obama push to require such ads? The government has in the past forced people to carry PSAs as a consequence of holding a broadcast license; it could do so in the future as a consequence of having a license to sell gasoline. Or alcohol. Or tobacco.
Our friend Jeffrey was recently speaking on this very topic, so when I saw that the Chronicle of Higher Education had written about it, I thought it might be a topic of interest to all of us.
In March, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, testified before the House Committee on Science and Technology about the abject failure of American schools, colleges, and universities to prepare students for advanced study in the sciences.Read it through, and let's discuss.
Well, that's not exactly what he testified. The purpose of his trip to the Hill was to impress on Congress the need for more H-1B visas.
What kind of house is Cassandra running, anyway? I trust that readers recognize the incivility associated with... hey, what's that noise?
...never mind.
Here is a short sample of a haunting piece of music by a group called La Nef ("The Ship"). It treats the Grail legend, and the arming of a young knight to wander in search of something beautiful -- though he cannot quite say what.
The full version is available here and here.
Do you recognize the song being sung? The lyrics are different, but the tune -- now slow, with polyphony -- is the old drinking song "The Star of the County Down."
But the tune is surely older, and it is no sin to imagine it ancient: for it well might be, fitted to other songs in other times, as is so often the case.
So today, Sen. Obama endorsed the California Model as the road to energy independence.
The state of California has implemented such a successful efficiency strategy that while electricity consumption grew 60% in this country over the last three decades, it didn’t grow at all in California. There is no reason we can’t do the same thing all across America.I was in California last in 2001. As the author points out, "rolling blackouts" was the watchword of the day. And "brownouts." This wasn't a "Model" to emulate, but a failure. As I recall, at the time we were last discussing who was responsible for the failure. Liberals cited deregulation as the cause of the failure (which means that for liberals the "California Model" is one to be avoided by governments in the future, as it was nothing but an abdication of their responsibility to act in the interest of the people); conservatives pointed to the governor (and succeeded in having him recalled over the point).
Dent argues that when Southerners criticize Obama, "They say, 'He's a Muslim, he's a mulatto Muslim, or quadroon Muslim … [only because] they don't want to use the old N word.""Quadroon"? Seriously?
Here's something I didn't expect to see when I got up today: Knights Templar sue Pope.
The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, whose members claim to be descended from the legendary crusaders, have filed a lawsuit against Benedict XVI calling for him to recognise the seizure of assets worth 100 billion euros (£79 billion).Ok... one thing I think I know about the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon is that they were under a vow of chastity. I realize that not every priest, even of the church militant, kept his vows with absolute faithfulness. Neverthless, is it really possible that there is a whole "association" of people in Spain who, seven hundred years after the Order was dissolved, can show that they are "descended" from knights of this Crusader order? Would a modern court really accept their standing to sue, on a seven-hundred year old question?
Elections are nothing if they are not time competitive. Evidently the "freezing of the opponent" that Alinsky recommends has not worked on McCain. He was not frozen. Once that happened McCain was operating inside Obama's decision loop.Discuss.
One that will not involve questions from the voters.
Barack Obama’s campaign made its distaste for free-style debates more or less official yesterday in their letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates. Team Obama only will agree to three debates, which has been the tradition through the last several presidential cycles, and all of them in the standard moderated format. He will not accept McCain’s challenge to meet him in a format where voters can ask the questions...Team McCain hits back with humor, which they have apparently decided will be the trademark of their campaign.
“We understand it might be beneath a worldwide celebrity of Barack Obama’s magnitude to appear at town hall meetings alongside John McCain and directly answer questions from the American people, but we hope he’ll reconsider.”We've talked about the disconnect between rhetoric and reality in this campaign before, so this is just another example. Sen. Obama is running on "a new politics," but in fact wants the campaign to run just as previous ones have run. He wants the media to continue to serve as the moderator and filter (no surprise, given that they are strongly allied with him), and to limit debates to the traditional number.
Francis Beckwith at Southern Appeal offers some advice to Obama on how to answer the latest McCain ad:
Here are some lines that I thought of on the way home from the gym today:(So, did you know that there were two financial entrepreneurs mentioned in the Bible? The first was Pharaoh's daughter, who went down to the river and pulled a little Prophet from the water...)
* I was going to invite Senator McCain to the Transfiguration. Not anymore.
* Ye of little faith.
* Next time he asks for me to heal his melanoma, the answer is “no.”
* I’ll turn water into wine for him, but I draw the line at being his designated driver.
* I’m surprised Senator McCain didn’t say, “I knew Moses; Moses was a friend of mine; Senator Obama, you are no Moses.”
* Ironically, more men named “Jesus” will vote for me than will vote for Senator McCain.
* The people want more jobs and less Job.
* This just shows us that the McCain campaign is a non-prophet organization.
Eric will be delighted to know that I have found the limit beyond which I will not accept something into my life simply because it has echoes of chivalry and knighthood. You can see that limit right here.
If there is an item in worse taste than a toilet seat featuring the arms of Richard the Lionheart (albeit with the wrong base color), I am not sure what it would be. Nominations are not solicited.
(I've gotten this catalog for several years now, for reasons unknown to me. They have the strangest mixture of really wonderful things, like this; kind of nifty things, like this; and truly horrid things like, well, heraldic toilet seats.)
We've all seen McCain's newest piece on Obama:
So what about this?
A new video which features popular talk show host Oprah Winfrey denying Jesus as the only way to God has received over 5 million views on several reporting video sites.Here is the video:
The approximately seven-minute video entitled, "The Church of Oprah Exposed," was posted less than a month ago and has claimed the a Top Favorites spot in the News & Politics category of a popular social networking site.
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, “If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.”
Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.
Again via FARK, a worthy followup to the post on clubs v. guns. Sometimes, older arms still work just fine:
Iwasaki, a Hillsboro native and decorated veteran, was honored last weekend as part of the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces. He served in a segregated unit that became the most decorated Army infantry group in U.S. history.Generally, what matters is the spirit. If the spirit is right, the mind follows: if the mind is right, the body follows.
Iwasaki fought across France and Italy during World War II and was wounded three times. He earned a Purple Heart with two oak leaf clusters and a Bronze Star before returning to Hillsboro in 1946.
Despite Iwasaki's military experience, Washington County deputies are wary about people confronting gun-wielding suspects.
Jake Tapper is not happy:
There's a lot of racist xenophobic crap out there. But not only has McCain not peddled any of it, he's condemned it.Ed Morissey agrees:
Back in February, McCain apologized for some questionable comments made by a local radio host. In April, he condemned the North Carolina Republican Party's ad featuring images of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
With one possible exception, I've never seen McCain or those under his control playing the race card or making fun of Obama's name -- or even mentioning Obama's full name, for that matter!
(The one exception was in March when McCain suspended a low-level campaign staffer for sending out to a small group of friends a link to a video that attempts to tie Obama not only to Wright but to the black power movement, rappers Public Enemy and Malcolm X.)
...
I've seen racism in campaigns before -- I've seen it against Obama in this campaign (more from Democrats than Republicans, at this point, I might add) and I've seen it against McCain in South Carolina in 2000, when his adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was alleged, by the charming friends and allies of then-Gov. George W. Bush, to have been a McCain love-child with an African-American woman.
What I have not seen is it come from McCain or his campaign in such a way to merit the language Obama used today. Pretty inflammatory.
I warned about this over a month ago, when Obama first accused McCain of racism without any evidence whatsoever. The McCain campaign has exercised considerable restraint in its choice of criticisms, frustrating some Republicans over his refusal to even mention the Jeremiah Wright debacle. It has roundly condemned other Republicans who have tried to use that argument in an attempt to show good faith in this electoral cycle, and the only payback McCain has received is to be called a racist anyway.Cassandra scoffs at the attempt to call 'racism':
I agree that the Celeb commercial is pretty weak, but if it’s racist, then Obama has defined the term so far downward as to have no meaning at all.
Yessir, there is nothing like a little honest dialog about race relations in America to dispel all that wrong/bad tension between blacks and whites. Because the Other Side, you know, they operate from the Politics of Fear. And the only way to combat the Divisive Fear and Hate perpetrated by those hateful, divisive fear mongers who keep dragging race into this campaign even though I'd prefer not to mention it is by constantly reminding you of Fear and Race. Because we all know that any criticism of Me during a hotly contested political campaign can only be based on 400 years of simmering racism.And Professor Reynolds notes:
I imagine that we'll see a lot of this kind of thing if Obama is elected President. And perhaps the best reason to vote against Obama is to spare the country an administration that reflexively characterizes any criticism as racist.It occurs to me that this -- if not quite a reason to vote for Sen. Obama -- could be a major consolation prize if he is elected. It's already the case in America that "racism" has gone from actual racism -- I remember the KKK passing out their literature on the courthouse square when I was a boy -- to "institutional" racism. "Institutional" racism is combatted in this country via a huge arrangement of what are meant to be counterbalances, but which are now the only way in which race is openly considered. Thus, the only formal recognition of race in society is designed to redound to the benefit of minorities.
This is the reason to visit the wounded:
“We have come … to express our gratitude and appreciation for the sacrifices made by these great warriors, soldiers, in freeing the Iraqi people and in helping us in Iraq recover from tyranny and dictatorship,” Jawad Karim al-Bolani, Iraq’s minister of the interior, said through a translator... “We also want to express our gratitude to the families of all these great men and women and express how important their sacrifices are for our nation,” he added.I haven't mentioned the subject of another visit that didn't happen, and don't intend this post to serve as a proxy for it. This, though, is what it's supposed to be about: and it's genuinely inspiring to see this man speak so.
Cassandra is compiling lists of great war movies today. This is something we've done a few times, but I have to remark on a couple of the entries suggested.
Bthun suggested "Casablanca." That's an interesting choice. It's not a "war movie" according to what I would normally think of as the defining features of the genre: all the actual fighting is quite a long way away. It's very much on the fringes of a war, though the war is large enough that it drives the plot.
More, though, it was written to encourage the United States to join a war. In that way, it is truly a war movie.
Another one that is mentioned is "Gone With The Wind." This is the point where I have to make my own confession, similar to those literary confessions from a day or two back.
I have never seen "Gone With The Wind." I realize, for a Southerner -- and a proud one -- this is a shocking omission. Nevertheless, I have not.
