At Home On Piety Hill

From the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Don’t you love Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin? So do I. It was fun watching Palin on Saturday Night Live and it’s cool that she’s such a good sport about their spoofs on her and the family. Check out this response in her recent People Magazine interview:

Interviewer: Tina Fey plays you sort of bubble-headed. You obviously –

Sarah Palin: That’s funny, I play her bubble-headed, too, when I imitate her.

I’m still, um, looking, uh, forward to SNL’s political satire of, uuuuuh, the Obama Presidency and that whiney first-lady, Michelle Marie-Antoinette Obama.

UPDATE!
10/27/2008   This just in: The Obama-O’Biden campaign blackballs a CBS affiliate for asking tough, pointed, fair questions — treatment that conservatives routinely and courageously respond to daily!!! It seems like just yesterday that the jackbooted thugs silenced an Orlando FL station for asking appropriate questions that, frankly, should have been asked of Obama and O’Biden throughout the campaign. 

I haven’t seen a news anchor treat a Democrat like a Libertarian or Republican in a long time. It was kind of refreshing for a change, but it seemed odd to see someone with all the trappings of the progressive media asking O’Biden tough questions. Though the depth and thoughtfulness of the interview was surprising, the Democrat response was predictable:

Biden so disliked West’s line of questioning that the Obama campaign canceled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the candidate’s wife.

“This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election,” wrote Laura K. McGinnis, Central Florida communications director for the Obama campaign.

Get ready for at least four years of this sort of Stalinist retaliation against any dissenting voices. By the way, I once heard someone say “dissent is patriotic.”

Yeah, I played some football when I was a kid and really enjoyed it… linebacker, mostly. As I tell my kids, I loved the feeling of gliding over the bodies, moving down the line and BAM!!!, hitting the runner as he emerges from the backfield. Or, hitting that tight end on a slant in… BAM!!! FUMBLE!!! 

Anyways, I’ve never been much of a football fan… way more fun to play than to watch. I also remember people saying that football players are dumb, but that was never my experience. I had fellow players go to West Point, become nurse practitioners and surgeons, head of the psychiatry department at a major university and one I know even went on to become a Postmaster!!! Yeah, that’s right… a Postmaster!

Well, here’s a video that demonstrates that football players have a lot more going for them upstairs than most people think. If I could find more examples of this sort of post-game coverage, I could be enticed to watch a little pro football.

Denise is collecting unique calendars… I get to use this one on my desk. It’s made of brass, it’s heavy-duty and it’s awesome. Every time you turn it over, the next day falls down into place. After the 31^st, it reminds to you to change month… then, instructs you to turn slowly and, finally, informs you that this cool calendar is covered by Patent # 241137, 1925. 

There has got to be one case of voter fraud by Republicans out there, but I can’t find one. And, you know, that’s saying something. Because if there was, it would be trumpeted on every network, every night from now until November. But, a little bit of searching on the web has turned up a number of gems.

Obama’s ACORN at work here: Missouri officials suspect fake voter registration

Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

“I don’t even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy,” Davis said. “We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don’t exist, people who have driver’s license numbers that won’t verify or Social Security numbers that won’t verify. Some have no address at all.”

The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic…

FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton said the agency has been in contact with elections officialsabout potential voter fraud and plans to investigate.

“It’s a matter we take very seriously,” Patton said. “It is against the law to register someone to vote who does not fall within the parameters to vote, or to put someone on there falsely.”

On Tuesday, authorities in Nevada seized records from ACORN after finding fraudulent registration forms that included the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

In April, eight ACORN workers in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards for the 2006 election. U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said they submitted cards with false addresses and names, and forged signatures.

Inside Obama’s Acorn: By their fruits ye shall know them by Stanley Kurtz

This is a story we’ve largely missed. While Obama’s Acorn connection has not gone entirely unreported, its depth, extent, and significance have been poorly understood. Typically, media background pieces note that, on behalf of Acorn, Obama and a team of Chicago attorneys won a 1995 suit forcing the state of Illinois to implement the federal “motor-voter” bill. In fact, Obama’s Acorn connection is far more extensive. In the few stories where Obama’s role as an Acorn “leadership trainer” is noted, or his seats on the boards of foundations that may have supported Acorn are discussed, there is little follow-up. Even these more extensive reports miss many aspects of Obama’s ties to Acorn.

Acorn, Obama and the Mortgage Mess by Mona Charen:

The financial markets were teetering on the edge of an abyss last week. The secretary of the Treasury was literally on his knees begging the speaker of the House not to sabotage the bailout bill. The crash of falling banks made the earth tremble. The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis. And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.

1 VOTER, 72 REGISTRATIONS ‘ACORN PAID ME IN CASH & CIGS’

CLEVELAND - A man at the center of a voter-registration scandal told The Post yesterday he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times, in apparent violation of Ohio laws.

“Sometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they’ll give me a dollar to sign up,” said Freddie Johnson, 19, who filled out 72 separate voter-registration cards over an 18-month period at the behest of the left-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

“The ACORN people are everywhere, looking to sign people up. I tell them I am already registered. The girl said, ‘You are?’ I say, ‘Yup,’ and then they say, ‘Can you just sign up again?’ ” he said.

Well, I’ve taken about all I can this election year. So, I’ll close out political week with a flurry of posts on a variety of issues for those with inquiring minds and plenty of time to peruse. I’ve done the footwork, so now all you need to do is click and enjoy. Let’s begin with this one…

Forget all that babble from Democrats and the automatons on the paleo-press about violence and hate at the McCain-Palin rallies. The real scary stuff is happening in neighborhoods across the land. Here we find progressives in New York expressing their tolerance during a recent march:

Meanwhile, in Portland there are some neo-hippies spreading their brand of peace, love and understanding through a creative use of fossil fuels:

Leslie Brockette Leudtke, 23, and Kevin Carl Robinson, 23, were held on at least eight felony charges of making a destructive device and possession of a destructive device. Leudtke also was charged with reckless burning.

Michael Barone sounds a warning about the potential for mischief if these jackboot thugs become emboldened when Obama sweeps to power in January ‘09. There’s a chill wind blowing across the land of the free:

That’s what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign e-mails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg’s WGN radio program in Chicago. Mr. Kurtz had been researching Mr. Obama’s relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago - papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.

Obama fans jammed WGN’s phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest e-mails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Mr. Rosenberg’s example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One…

These attempts to shut down political speech have become routine for liberals. Congressional Democrats sought to reimpose the “fairness doctrine” on broadcasters, which until it was repealed in the 1980s required equal time for different points of view. The motive was plain: to shut down the one conservative-leaning communications medium, talk radio…

Then there’s the Democrats’ “card check” legislation that would abolish secret ballot elections in determining whether employees are represented by unions. The unions’ strategy is obvious: Send a few thugs over to employees’ homes - we know where you live - and get them to sign cards that will trigger a union victory without giving employers a chance to be heard…

Today’s liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters. Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that once prided themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Mr. Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to claims this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

The race is heating up and it’s getting wild and wacky. Just check out some of these stories from across America and the world. I think you’ll see what I mean.

They are taking the election really seriously in the UK and, believe it or not, some people in the rest of the world don’t seem to think Obama’s is the One to restore our tarnished image abroad:

Dube Egwuatu was buying a mobile telephone top-up card in an off-licence when the gunman confronted him and glared at the top, which carries an image of the Democrat US presidential candidate underneath the legend ‘Believe’. The man then launched into a tirade of racist slurs, shouting ‘I f***ing hate n*****s’ and urging 36-year-old Mr Egwuatu to leave the shop with him… After pleading with the man to leave him alone, the married former street warden put the keys in the ignition and turned the engine on.The attacker then fired the gas-powered ball-bearing pistol three times, hitting the civil servant in the face, hand and shoulder.

Perhaps the criminal in this story is upset about the sub prime debacle, like those racist Republicans in the next story…

Frank says GOP housing attacks racially motivated

BOSTON (AP) - Rep. Barney Frank said Monday that Republican criticism of Democrats over the nation’s housing crisis is a veiled attack on the poor that’s racially motivated… by blaming the country’s mortgage foreclosure problem on efforts to expand affordable housing through the Community Reinvestment Act…

“They get to take things out on poor people,” Frank said at a mortgage foreclosure symposium in Boston. “Let’s be honest: The fact that some of the poor people are black doesn’t hurt them either, from their standpoint. This is an effort, I believe, to appeal to a kind of anger in people.”

This is one of the most annoying and dangerous developments in this election year. Those on the left are playing the race card in a big way. Any criticism of progressive candidates or policies is boiled down to racism or fear on the part of the, so-called, bitter clingers. Pathetic… but, effective in silencing the opposition. Fortunately, some will not be bullied this way and John Boehner inserts some sanity into the discussion:

House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio called Frank’s remarks “a lame, desperate attempt to divert Americans’ attention away from the Democratic party’s obstruction of reforms that would have reined in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and helped our nation avoid this economic crisis.”

“Congressman Frank should retract his ridiculous statements and start taking responsibility for the role he and other top Democrats played in putting Main Street Americans in this mess,” Boehner said.

The longtime congressman is being challenged this fall by both Republican and independent candidates. He has been criticized in his liberal district for being one of the leaders of congressional efforts last week to win approval of a $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan. 

I have to give credit where it is due and, on this account, the cast and writers of Saturday Night Live were able to distill the entire mess down into one skit. Evidently the powerful progressives outed in the skit have put pressure on SNL to edit the piece, but you can still see the transcript here, if you haven’t already. From the LA Weekly:

BecauseSNL labeled Herb Sandler and his wife Marion, the real-life former owners of Oakland’s Golden West Financial (aka World Savings), as “people who should be shot” and accused them of predatory lending that brought down Wachovia Bank even though no charges have been filed. NBC told me just now they never received any legal threat from the Sandlers. [Though the couple did give an angry interview to The Associated Press about the SNL sketch.]

Instead, the network claimed: ”Upon review, we caught certain elements in the sketch that didn’t meet our standards. We took it down and made some minor changes and it will be back online soon.” Specifically, NBC said it has edited out the chyron on-screen text, “People who should be shot” that appeared beneath the Sandler’ lookalikes, as well as the “allegations of corruption” made against the couple.

Remember this: In a progressive or liberal America, only people on the right or the religious or those who are a little different can be singled out, parodied and silenced. Kudos to SNL for courageously speaking truth to power, even if they were coerced to cave in the end. 

Other examples of lunacy out there:

Black Congressmen Declare Racism In Palin’s Rhetoric

Senator Claire McCaskill (D Missouri) grosses Romney out

Barack Obama has raised about $3.3 million from contributors who did not list a home state or who designated their state with an abbreviation that did not match one of the 50 states or U.S. territories

Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote — an organization which has solid ties to Obama

The Promised One has come and the children sing His praises:

Others recite His creed:

Religious leaders say He’s the Messiah:

Would you like to host an Obama Camp at your school or in your living room? The Virginia Education Association may be able to assist you with the help of their dues paying members and taxpayers… whatever it takes to get the message out.

From USA Today:

Obama Shifts Stance On Environmental Issues

WASHINGTON — In May 1998, at the urging of the state’s coal industry, the Illinois Legislature passed a bill condemning the Kyoto global warming treaty and forbidding state efforts to regulate greenhouse gases.
Barack Obama voted “aye.”

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee now calls climate change “one of the greatest moral challenges of our generation”… 

The Obama campaign did not respond to questions about his support for the coal industry, except to address his 1998 Kyoto vote. The campaign said in a statement that the Kyoto treaty did not have “meaningful and achievable emissions targets,” and that Obama “did not believe that state agencies in Illinois should unilaterally take steps to implement a global policy on their own …” The statement said Obama supports investing in technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal burning… Obama also drew criticism for sponsoring a bill in January 2007 to devote $8 billion in subsidies to a technology to convert coal to liquid fuel. The Sierra Club says liquid coal “releases almost double the global warming emissions per gallon as regular gasoline.”

As the presidential campaign was well underway in June 2007, the Obama campaign issued a clarification: He would not support liquid coal processes unless they emit a fifth less carbon than conventional fuels.

“When you’re running for president and you’ve got environmentalists biting your head off every day, that’s to be expected,” said Phil Gonet, head of the Illinois Coal Association. “We’re still optimistic that he may be helpful at some point in the future.”

Oh, he’ll be helpful alright… if, you show him the money. Frankly, I don’t expect much change on the energy issue, except that grants and taxpayer dollars will flow with very little to show, in the way of clean energy. There is nothing remotely close to replacing oil, natural gas or coal at this point in time. It’s not because of some conspiracy or lack of research or funding. We are in the age of oil and it will transition to something else, sometime in the future. If it’s not nuclear, or nucular, as every Republican seems to pronounce it, I don’t know what that replacement fuel will be.

In the interim, the progressives will make political hay out of it, while burning up millions of gallons of fossil fuels, driving their Outbacks around with their plastic kayaks or Thule carriers on top. I follow them every day, to and from work. I can barely keep up with ‘em.

Oh, yes, you ask… “Am I down on alternative energy?” Heavens no! We’ve been greener than most of the hippies I’ve known for the past 30 years. Denise and I live in a small house, consume much less than your average liberal activist, drive used cars, recycle and dry our clothes on the line. Always have. Sure, we need to keep looking for new forms of energy and I’m confident that the market and common sense will ferret them out. Until then, rather than curse the darkness I advocate buying some XOM now that it’s down in the affordable range… hang onto it for a while… they’ll probably lead the way into new sources of energy and produce a nice little nest egg for your future. 

People are clamoring for change. Here are some fresh perspectives on Sarah Palin for a change.

First, this editorial from the UK:

In short, far from being a small-town mayor concerned with little more than traffic signs, she has been a major player in state politics for a decade, one who formulated an ambitious agenda and deftly implemented it against great odds.

Her sudden elevation to the vice-presidential slot on the Republican ticket shocked no one more than her enemies in Alaska, who have broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of Palin in Washington, guiding the Justice Department’s anti-corruption teams through the labyrinths of Alaska’s old-boy network. 

And, remember the Charlie Gibson interview, when Palin didn’t seem to know what the Bush Doctrine was? Well, the man who first coined the phrase, the Bush Doctrine, had his own gotcha moment when he pointed out that it was Charlie Gibson and the New York Times who fumbled and bumbled that one:

The New York Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong. There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?” She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?” Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

That’s not all. A real feminist, Camille Paglia, appreciates the appearance of Sarah Palin on the scene, even if she does not share many of the same ideas, politically:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist… Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics — which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama’s campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don’t see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

I’ve tried to explain this to people… From The Guardian:

People who believe they have the greenest lifestyles can be seen as some of the main culprits behind global warming, says a team of researchers, who claim that many ideas about sustainable living are a myth.

According to the researchers, people who regularly recycle rubbish and save energy at home are also the most likely to take frequent long-haul flights abroad. The carbon emissions from such flights can swamp the green savings made at home, the researchers claim.

The issue is not hypocrisy — everyone is a hypocrite, so that’s not news. The problem is that there are people around who set themselves up as the arbiters of who is responsible enough to enjoy the goodies and who’s not. Al Gore is just one such preachy, finger-wagging moralist, who is sucking the planet dry. Why anyone would pay any attention to that blow-hard is mind boggling to me.

Suddenly being green is not cool any more: As the credit crunch bites, environmental policies are being ditched. But oddly we are doing better at saving the planet

Julie Burchill can’t stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don’t want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.

Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the “nutbag ecologists” are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans.

So the salad days are over; it’s the end of the greens. Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence.

But the problem for the green lobby isn’t that it has been overrun by “toffs”: it’s the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone.

Meanwhile, this article in the National Journal suggests that Americans are becoming smarter:

According to a survey [PDF] from ABC News, Planet Green and Stanford University, fewer than half — 47 percent — of Americans consider global warming an important issue to them personally, down from 52 percent in April 2007. Although a vast majority still think the planet is warming — 8 in 10 respondents — that figure is also down from last year, having dropped 4 percentage points. Furthermore, in an open-ended question, the number of respondents who called global warming the biggest environmental challenge facing the world fell 8 points from 2007 and currently hovers at 25 percent.

When the people lead, the leaders (and scientists) will follow:

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.  The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science…. editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling… Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors”

Finally, we may have the answer to what’s been driving the environmental hysteria all these years:

MELBOURNE: Scientists have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain-with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage. 

Vegans and vegetarians are the most likely to be deficient because the best sources of the vitamin are meat, particularly liver, milk and fish. VitaminB12 deficiency can also cause anaemia and inflammation of the nervous system. Yeast extracts are one of the few vegetarian foods which provide good levels of the vitamin. 

Why Are These Folks So Happy?

Conflict of Interest Anyone?

Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s. So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.

Obama’s Financial Advisors Cleaned Up

Let’s say hello to Mr. Democrat James A. Johnson, who ran Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, served as vice chairman from 1990 to 1991, and earlier worked as a managing director at Lehman Bros. and for Vice President Walter F. Mondale. He currently leads the American Friends of Bilderberg and made news earlier this summer when he had to resign as vice-presidential-candidate vetter for Barack Obama “as new details emerged about loans Mr. Johnson received from mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp.

Jamie Gorelick: A One Woman Wrecking Crew

From SLATE: Next up is Jamie S. Gorelick, whose official résumé describes her as “one of the longest serving Deputy Attorneys General of the United States,” a position she held during the Clinton administration. Although Gorelick had no background in finance, she joined Fannie Mae in 1997 as vice chair and departed in 2003. For her trouble, Gorelick collected a staggering $26.4 million in total compensation, including bonuses.

 

Well, a lot has happened since I began the draft of this post almost two months ago and photoshopped the images. Back then, Obama was on top and I thought he was the sure bet. Then, McCain came back with a surprisingly crisp campaign apparatus, but he quickly went into a tailspin and it looks as if it’s Obama by a nose. This go-’round I don’t have a horse in the race, so I’m enjoying this election a lot more. I don’t care for either of the candidates. I suppose Fred Thompson would have suited me.

Anyway, I think I’ll blog a lot of politics for the next week to sort of purge it out of my system and then get back to the fun stuff: Family and friends, Maine, art, books and music with some Krazy Kitsch thrown in for good measure.

Now, there’s plenty of talk out there about hope and change, but not much detail about what or who we’re hoping in and what kind of change we want to see. It’s as if the two words are floated out as empty containers and the audience is left to fill in their notions, their ideas about what kind of change each of the candidates is offering. Actually, I think that’s the strategy. Put out some reassuring, yet imprecise phrases to make people come away with an optimistic feeling about one candidate or the other.

So, which of our two presidential candidates presents us with the best chance to see some positive changes?

Thoroughly Modern McCain First, we have John McCain who has been in politics since I was a boy. He’s a bona fide war hero with a compelling story and I salute him for that. But, he was also one of the Keating Five, the gang of fourteen and he crafted legislation which limits my right to free speech under the First Amendment. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but he’s a deal-maker and I think he would get rolled by the Congress every time. So, under McCain I would expect to see government grow… not much change there. I’m  already bored just writing about a McCain presidency.

His Holiness Barak Obama All of the institutions came together and anointed Obama King of the World, so I suppose we’ll have to change some things around here to accommodate him after he makes the triumphal entry into Washington in January. Gwen Ifill, the vice-presidential debate moderator, wrote a prophetic book about Barak’s ascension, slated for release on inauguration day. In his case, not only will congress work him pretty good, but I expect Russia or China to test his mettle before Summer ‘09. I suppose the only real change I expect with an Obama presidency is a decline in US influence abroad. It didn’t take long for him to become a Washington insider… and fabulously wealthy.

Joey O’Biden What about Obama’s choice of Joe Biden for VP? He’s also been in the Senate since I was a boy and doesn’t show signs of change. During his failed primary, He joined Hillary Clinton in declaring Obama is unqualified to be Commander in Chief, but now Joe seems to see Barak as a regular George Patton or something. Of course, he did certify that Obama is an  ”articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.“ Same old beltway politics. Biden has, however, changed history, which is pretty slick. He said FDR addressed the nation on television in 1929 to calm the fears of the American people following the stock market crash. What a buffoon! You know what would be a change? If Saturday Night Live lampooned this clown for the most enormous verbal gaff of the entire political season.

Governor Sarah Palin Now, John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for VP has introduced some changes. She and her husband have a combined family income that’s down there in the normal range. She’s a Republican, running against the real enemy: snotty, east coast pseudo-intellectuals and pop-journalists. Man, that’s a refreshing development and I sure wish there was a real man at the top of the ticket, to watch her back. 

Oh, well… we’ll see what the next 30 days bring.