Woo hoo!

It's a beautiful morning in Illinois! The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, was arrested by the FBI this morning on corruption charges! After hearing the news I courted danger by doing a sort of one-legged Twist in celebration.

Marriage as a natural right

Here's an interesting look at marriage as a natural right rather than a benefit to be received from the state.

A hearty laugh

That's what Lisa and I shared last night when we realized Joe Biden is going to be the Vice-President.

Coffee on my keyboard

and my desk and my shirt, when John McCain explained what a true Republican maverick he is. He's really good at this:

My invitation from Barack

Hmm... Barack Obama just invited me to Grant Park in Chicago next Tuesday to help him celebrate his coronation, er, election. I think I'll pass - freelance wealth redistribution doesn't much interest me.

One last prediction

Not a landslide, but a decisive victory by McCain Tuesday night. "Decisive" meaning we'll know the election is over Tuesday night, not sometime the month after next.

Email from Joe Biden!

So a couple of nights ago I signed up at Barack Obama's website to see whether they had my info in their "neighbor-to-neighbor" database. They didn't, but today I hit the jackpot - an email from Joe Biden himself! Old Joe is pretty handy with the html email - his links are well formed and he even included a video of last night's teevee special about compassionate King Obama meeting His Downtrodden Subjects.

How Joe finds the time, I'll never know. Maybe he'd rather send email than talk to those pesky McCainiac reporters. I can say that he writes better than he speaks - there wasn't a gaffe or even a single grocer's apostrophe in the whole email.

Joe linked to this page at Barack's website - I like how SUBMIT is down there in big bold letters. (Ha ha. I'm joking - we all know the Big O isn't a Muslim :-) I'm wondering whether I should respond to the windy old Senator from Delaware. Last time I emailed my own personal Senator Dick "US troops are Nazis" Durbin, I didn't receive a reply. Maybe if Barack is elected next Tuesday, Dick will send someone around to talk to me in person.

This is what "red" used to mean

Who switched red and blue? Was it USA Today back in the 2000 election with their red & blue county-by-county election map? Nowadays I still have to mentally swap the colors to make sense of writings about "red states" and "blue states".

Anyways, it's bass-ackwards. This is what red used to mean.

The complete works of Thomas Jefferson

A fresidential pirst?

I don't recall ever hearing a Spoonerism from a presidential candidate. It was a run-of-the-mill thing, "freth of bresh air" or somesuch, not approaching the magnificent Ur-Spoonerism "What am I to tell this audience of beery wenches?" And I think I heard something about nuclear power pants.

Anyhoo, McCain came out hitting hard tonight and did pretty well.

Come the Golden Age...

of Democrat control of the executive, legislature and judiciary on the federal and state levels, this sort of election engineering will be much easier: no one will ever find out about it. I suppose once in a while they'll let a tame, domesticated, tutored Republican win to keep up appearances.

Could have been better

My two cents on last night's debate before I start reading other bloggers: McCain was old and tired last night, and seemed slightly confused. He enjoys delivering his little one-liners that seem meant to provoke laughs from sympathetic audiences, but he seemed to forget that he was in front of an audience last night that had been told not to react. He seemed to loose his sense of place just slightly as I've seen in elderly relatives who can't track context as well as they used to.

And yet, Obama lost the debate even worse than McCain did. He came across as dour, grim, lethargic, nearly as old as McCain. Neither one had the Palinesque gumption to go beyond their long-memorized talking points (or maybe she's just memorized better ones). In the two debates so far, McCain didn't even stick to them; he seems so sick of the things he just telegraphs them with a contextless phrase or two. And neither one could refrain from their damn pointless jabs at each other that kept miring the whole ramshackle debate in repetitive tedium.

Here's Q and O on the issues last night.

Abortion and other evils

It seems that among Catholic Democrats, abortion is just one evil among many: poverty, racism, capitalism, et cetera. The argument is that we can best fight the evil of abortion by abolishing its root causes - hence their futile quest to end human evil and perfect human nature through politics. Elizabeth Scalia demolishes those arguments here by noting that all those "other" evils are fully present in abortion:

Government policy affects war, poverty, and the rest, while abortion is — like the casting of a vote — a personal choice. But it is a personal choice for the physical and intellectual internalization of war, and of torture, and of the death penalty, and of poverty, and of racism, and of capitalistic exploitation.

"And THAT will settle the Manichees!" :-)

Why are the media squandering their credibility?

Because they won't need credibility come the Glorious Millenium of Obama.

Straight outta North Korea

Ho Lee Crap - it's a Nork-style religion. Brainwashed children sing the praises of Dear Leader:

The Anchoress knocks it out of the park.

Update: this video seems to be the tipping point for a lot of folks:

• Joseph Goebbels Rises Up From The Dead And Leads Liberal Media To Their Messiah
• The new brownshirts
• It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.
• The HopeChange GroupThink Mindthoughts Song
• The indoctrination of children begins
• Amazing (dis)Grace: Obama children video
• The Church of Obama

Home from Iraq to handle the post-election riots?

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

Benedict XVI on the media

This excerpt from Pope Benedict XVI's second Regina Cæli address in 2005 seems appropriate for the current silly season in America: the media can promote knowledge, dialog and peace, or prejudice, contempt and violence. The perennial remedies are personal responsibility, objectivity, respect for human dignity and attention to the common good.

Responsibility and respect for human dignity seem to be basic human habits learned (or not) at a young age in the family; perhaps objectivity and sight of the common good are habits of thought that come with maturity. Can they be taught? Are they? What would an objective media serving the common good even look like? [how about C-SPAN? -ed.]

Anyways,

World Communications Day is being celebrated this Sunday on the theme: "The communications media: at the service of understanding among peoples". In today's world of imagery, the mass media effectively become an extraordinary resource to promote solidarity and understanding within the human family. We have had incredible proof of this recently on the occasion of the death and solemn funeral rites of my beloved Predecessor, John Paul II. It all depends, however, on how these means are used.

These important tools of communication can support reciprocal knowledge and dialogue or, on the contrary, fuel prejudice and contempt between individuals and peoples; they can contribute to spreading peace or fomenting violence. This is why an appeal must always be made to personal responsibility; all must do their part to ensure objectivity, respect for human dignity and attention to the common good in all forms of communication. In this way they contribute to bringing down the walls of hostility that continue to divide humanity, and to strengthening the bonds of friendship and love which are signs of God's Kingdom in history.

(Hmm... insidious politics worked its way back in.)

Overdose

To the great relief of my half-dozen readers, I've overdosed on politics and will attempt to refrain from posting on that stuff until November.

Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius

Every day, Obama looks more and more like Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius.

Lipstick redux

A friend of mine has started a web business and the first item up for sale is a visual riff on Barry Obama's cryptic "lipstick on a pig" gaffe. Click! Buy! I think a barbecue recipe wouldn't be out of place.

Update: they have bloggage.

"Obama To Dispatch Female Surrogates"

This is the best political campaign ever! Now starring Barack Obama as Harcourt Fenton Mudd:

and Hillary Clinton, Janet Napolitano and Kathleen Sebelius as Mudd's women:

"These go to eleven."

So said Nigel Tufnel. Imagine what would happen if McCain & Palin are elected and Palin inherits the presidency. We've seen the media and the left (pardon the redundancy) reach some pretty revolting depths as they suffer through their eighth year of Bush Derangement Syndrome; imagine the white-hot flood of molten hatred they'll heap on President Palin as they try to destroy her - a wife and mother who dares to put on her shoes and step out of her kitchen without the blessing of the old feminist hags. They'll have to turn their amps up to eleven.

Quick! Fire up the youtubes!

Someone needs to do this to this like yesterday already.

Update: here's a working link to the video. Lots of rich Americans telling us that America sux, dude. Only the Big O can save us.

What are the odds...

Too good to be true

Introducing the Ronco Gaffe-O-Matic!

CNN is reporting that Barack Obama has chosen the worst possible running mate: erstwhile presidential candidate Joe Biden. Since the only thing that has stood between Biden and the presidency is his mouth, and since Obama is no chrysostom himself, this should be lots of fun as the Republicans mop the floor with Obama/Biden. It won't quite be a Mondale/Ferraro blowout, but it'll still be a fun November 4 for Republicans.

Unless the Democrats really do nominate Hillary Clinton - then all bets are off.

Update: I didn't realize, because I don't keep up with Bideniana, that he's a pro-abortion Catholic who believes that life begins at conception. Figure that one out. At least he's consistent, though: he supports the death penalty both for criminals and for children.

Thanks, Barry

It looks like my alma mater, the University of Illinois, is covering for yet another corrupt Chicago politician.

A crazy prediction

By the end of the upcoming Democrat national convention in Denver later this month, Hillary Clinton will be their presidential nominee. Perhaps with Barack Obama as her running mate. It'll be even more entertaining than the Olympics!

The Prophecy of the Obamessiah

Slave Nation

Jim Lindgren takes a look at the historical antecedents of Service Nation.

The immunological argument against immigration

Here in Small Town, Illinois, we don't see much of the illegal-immigration crisis aside from an occasional Spanish name in the newspaper's police column, usually someone arrested for drunken driving or domestic violence. Immigrant crime isn't even a big issue in the large nearby cities.

But while my wife and I were discussing the recent news about vaccines and autism (apparently John McCain linked the two recently) we stumbled across an argument in favor of strict immigration control: these people pouring over the border haven't had their shots and some of them are likely to be carrying God-knows-what infection that's been practically eradicated in America. For us and our children, that's a compelling reason to support closing our southern border. It also seems to be a compelling reason to keep kids away from government programs that service the children of illegal immigrants, such as Head Start.

UPDATE: a measles outbreak in San Diego by way of an unvaccinated 7-year-old child who brought it from Switzerland.

Howard Dean endorses John McCain

As Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in his endorsement of John Kerry in 2004,

"The real issue is this: Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?"

Gee, John McCain's military honors include the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, the Purple Heart, and the Distinguished Flying Cross, and he saw a bit more action in Vietnam than John Kerry did.

Hat tip: Jake Tapper

What if?

If she wins the Democratic nomination, can Hillary Clinton name her husband, the former President Clinton, as her vice-presidential candidate? The 22nd amendment to the Constitution doesn't seem to rule it out:

Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Section 2. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states within seven years from the date of its submission to the states by the Congress.

Obviously I'm not the first person to think of this.

A bit over the top

Obamamania has jumped the shark, as illustrated in this video. Me, I'm skeptical of the attribution of Godlike qualities to an ordinary corrupt racist Chicago Democrat.

Angling for a job

Looks like AP journalist Ron Fournier wants to be President Hillary Clinton's press secretary come next January.

Abortion, that Jesuit tradition

Farewell, Des Moines

I'd think that the very first act of a newly-elected President would be to nuke Des Moines, Iowa. Some of the Presidential candidates have been full-time residents of Iowa the last few years, traveling to every last little coffee shop and beauty salon to whore themselves to every last Iowan. Don't they (the politicians and the Iowans) get thoroughly sick of it all?

On the other hand, I wouldn't mind owning an Iowa teevee station. These campaigns with their round-the-clock commercials are the closest thing to money trees you'll ever find.

Meanwhile, three cheers for the doughty legislators of New Mexico and South Dakota who put their state primaries last on the schedule. Surely no campaigning politician will bother those lucky citizens.

WQAD says I'm with Fred

Says it right here, and it says my preferences are perfectly opposed to those of Mrs Clinton & Chicago's Senator Obama - they don't even show up on the list.

I'd happily vote for Thompson or McCain; I'd hold my nose and vote for Huckabee, Romney or Giuliani, and I'd vote for a Democrat before I'd vote for Ron Paul.

To digress a bit, I once voted for a big-time Democrat - Paul Simon for US Senator in my first election (I blame my youth and stupidity - I apparently swallowed the local Democrat propaganda that passed for news). I've also voted for a couple of Democrats here in Small Town, IL - the previous owner of our house for township commissioner and our realtor for township assessor or somesuch. To digress from a digression, the latter guy is an 80-something-year-old WW2 veteran and fellow parishioner with more energy than most teenagers.

Yeesh

I don't hang out much in the fever swamps of the net, so I was surprised to find a crackpot-Ronulan convergence at the Lew Rockwell website and blog: the paleos are hot for Dr Ron.

Subsidiarity

Which is not what you get from Santa Hillary. We'd rather keep our own money and educate our own children, thankyouverymuch. Does she even know where government money comes from?

"Isn't this like when you get presents from family members and you know they charged it on your credit card?" —Ann Althouse

HillaryCare in Illinois

We have excellent but danged expensive insurance through Wolfram Research, so we investigated Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's "KidCare rebate" program. If you're approved, you get a monthly check from Governor Rod to help cover the cost of insurance premiums.

Nice, eh? Not so much. We don't make the $X.00 per month required to have our kids covered by the rebate program, and we don't make the $X.00 + $300.00 per month required to cover all of us.

Yes, we're too poor to receive help with our insurance premiums. It then became obvious what the governor is up to. Poor people like us shouldn't have medical insurance at all - we should be vassals of the all-powerful Democrats who run Illinois like a plantation and we should receive all care and treatment through them. The high thresholds for rebates are an incentive to leave insurance and enter the state system, which we can't bring ourselves to trust with our special-needs children.

A point to remember in the upcoming presidential campaign season: Illinois' health program is a testbed for HillaryCare's socialized medicine.

Workforce anecdote

This bit from Glenn Reynolds reminded me of something. On our last trip to Indiana it was strange to see Anglo-Saxon-style Hoosiers doing outdoors work. Here in Illinois Mexicans do that sort of work outside the smaller towns. Why the difference?

HillaryCare + HealthVault

equals some kinda nightmare. Imagine the combination of nationalized medical care, a Big Brother medical database (Microsoft's HealthVault) and the coercive power of government.