Month: February 2008

  • Obama Says: Take Me Seriously

    There is no truth to the report that Obama contacted the Candians and said “I’m serious about gutting NAFTA” [Youtube]. Instapundit remarks: REBUILDING AMERICA’S IMAGE IN THE WORLD (CONT’D): “Mexico and Canada yesterday voiced concerns about calls by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, as the Democratic presidential…

  • “If we deliver a convincing win in Pennsylvania, she’ll end up being the nominee”

    I don’t know why, but Reuters is circulating a picture of a wide-eyed, glowing, Hillary Clinton standing in front of a leering devil. Naturally, Drudge has linked it, with a headline calling her a devil right under other headlines announcing how close she is in Ohio and Texas. Meanwhile, in what’s being buried as a…

  • I refuse to be forced to be passive-aggressive!

    Andrew Sullivan has been complaining that Glenn Reynolds is “passive-agressive,” and while Glenn said Andrew was clueless, I’m even more clueless, as I don’t know what passive-aggressive means in this new context. No seriously. If Glenn’s approach — linking interesting stuff like this — is passive-aggressive (er, “Mr Passive-Aggressive” seems to be the correct term),…

  • Talking Points for “Obamacans”?

    I don’t know whether what I’m about to quote from is the Talk Left piece Glenn Reynolds linked earlier, but I couldn’t get it to open, and I found this anyway. Whether it’s the same piece or not, it’s just too rich for me to ignore. Former San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez…

  • Reject or denounce the repudiator of your choice!

    Ann Althouse has the most detailed analysis I’ve seen of Barack Obama’s tap-dancing performance over the Farrakhan endorsement. I don’t want to dissect the back and forth in the debate in detail, as Althouse has already done a marvelous job. Basically, Hillary Clinton had Obama dead to rights, but then she blew it. I think…

  • If it takes Obama….

    Ann Althouse links Michael Crowley’s discussion of David Duke’s rather nonchalant reaction to the presidential race. Apparently, the hard-core racists don’t know which candidate would best suit their agenda: Amazingly, some commenters on racist websites are already debating the grim choice between Obama and McCain. I don’t think that’s especially amazing. For the conspiracy theory…

  • Testing the waters….

    Here’s a picture I took last week on the edge of Lake Okeechobee, Florida: While it’s dried out in the sun, that plate-covered, prehistoric-looking fish ought to look familiar to many home aquarium keepers, as it’s a Plecostomus, best known as the “algae eater.” I had not known that the Plecostomus had been introduced into…

  • William F. Buckley, Jr. 1925-2008

    I’m sorry to hear on the radio that William F. Buckley, Jr. has died. (Confirmed by Marc Ambinder, who cites the National Review’s Corner.) Kathryn Jean Lopez reports as follows: I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died overnight in his study in Stamford, Connecticut. After…

  • Is there a glass ceiling in the back of the bus?

    I think the most likely end result of all of the Democratic Party infighting I discussed in the last post will be a Clinton Obama “party unity” ticket. This assumes that Obama would swallow his pride and accept the number two spot even if he won the most delegates. It might sound ugly, but it’s…

  • may the best votes win!

    Regardless of who “wins” the Democratic primary elections next week, neither candidate will win enough delegates to win the nomination. All that will happen is that both will win more delegates in proportion to the vote. If the races are close, this means there will be no major net change, and Hillary Clinton and Barack…

  • Coming soon….The Hillary Surge?

    Rightly or wrongly, Frank Rich (in a piece called “The Audacity of Hopelessness“) has applied the Iraq war model to the Democratic primary election: WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.…

  • God hates dog

    I complain a lot about the growing nanny state threat to dog ownership in the United States, but fortunately, dog control measures are nowhere near as draconian here as they are in Iran: A 70-year-old Iranian man was arrested and sentenced to four months in jail and 30 lashes for walking his dog, Adnkronos.com reported…

  • Hillary gives people an Ickes feeling ….

    Earlier today I read that democratic operatives in Pennsylvania are doing their damnedest to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot. I see this as further evidence that Hillary Clinton has every intention of winning the nomination — which, even assuming she wins Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, she will have to win by the hardest of…

  • And the endorsements keep rolling in!

    Speaking of context, yesterday’s post on Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Obama reminded me that because anyone can endorse anyone (and thus, candidates cannot control them), endorsements have to be seen in context. That Farrakhan endorsed Obama does not mean a lot in and of itself, and it certainly isn’t fair to imply that Obama agrees…

  • my context is not mine

    What is creation? I’m not getting cosmic here, because I’m talking about the manufacturing process — whether in the artistic sense or the commercial sense or both — when a thing or things are made by man. In the broad sense, creation can be said to be anyone making anything, but in the property sense…

  • “He got 3 votes!”

    God help me, but I thought this was funny. It’s not nice to laugh at people’s misfortunes. I must be sicker than I realized.

  • The savior and the she-devil

    While I doubt it matters to any of the people in question, I don’t especially like Louis Farrakhan’s crackpot race-based view of Barack Obama: “This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better,” he said. “This young man is capturing audiences of black and brown and…

  • Hard core modest proposal

    Looking at the ongoing campaign he calls “soft jihad,” (which “uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance”) Roger Kimball offers a modest proposal to…

  • Dead blogging the Oscars III

    Had it not been for this Pajamas Media piece, I might have forgotten that tonight was Oscar Night. Which would have been bad, right? Because it’s been an annual tradition here that I’m at least supposed to Dead-blog the Oscars, and here I am just turning them on in time to see a woman who…

  • If they’re not racist, then they’re sexist!
    And vice versa!
    Or both!

    I want to return to Dr. Helen’s post about male-bashing, especially in the context of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario she discussed (and with which I identified). It has become apparent that Pennsylvania will be the ultimate showdown state in the increasingly nasty battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and no matter what happens, fault will…