Friday night, Jed Baer emailed a few of us about this video at the von Mises Institute, but it wouldn't load for me. Yesterday, LGF posted it. It's damned funny, but in a slightly disturbing way — both the overall idea and the positions of the panel members are just too close to the truth.
It's from the Onion News Network, which Charles Johnson called "one of the last remaining credible mainstream news sources." Enjoy!
The Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter thinks the election of Obama will have some good consequences for black America, especially in terms of "the eclipse of the old." First and foremost (emphasis in original):
The studious black teen will no longer be tarred as "thinking he's white." …
… For decades, there have been innumerable reports of black students faced with a choice between hitting the books and having black friends.
From now on, however, there is a ready riposte to being tarred as "acting white" for liking school: "Is Barack Obama white?"
God, I hope he's right. I foresee lots of bad consequences from the election of Obama, but this one would be a huge positive. Not just for black Americans, but for all of us.
I hope McWhorter's other two predictions are correct, too. Read the whole thing.
I noted yesterday that the Navy team was "coming on strong," and I was right. They've surged into the lead. The Army team is still solidly in second place, far ahead of the also-ran services. With your help, Army can regain the lead — and help lots of severely wounded troops in the process.
If you've served in the Army, or have a friend or relative who's serving or has served, or if you just like the Army uniforms or recruitment ads — click the Project Valour-IT contribution banner in the left sidebar and donate a few bucks! It's a great cause, and you'll feel good for being part of it. I promise.
"There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." — Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part II
Today's big story/rumor/speculation — Barack Obama is considering offering the Secretary of State job to Hillary Clinton:
Two Democratic officials confirmed that Clinton – long rumored to be a contender for the job – is under serious consideration.
Adding to the intrigue, Obama and Clinton met yesterday in Chicago, according to a Democratic official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
I've heard several pundits say this would be a great pick because of her foreign policy credentials. Huh? Did I miss something? Or are they referring to tagging along with her hubby on various globetrotting trips as foreign policy experience?
And how would Obama reconcile such a choice with his sharp differences with Hillary on foreign policy in particular? Oh, I forgot. He won't have to because the media will give him a pass on that.
It could be a shrewd plan to make sure she's in no position to challenge Obama in 2012, if he drives disastrously leftward and recreates the Carter years in spades (pardon the expression).
It's unclear whether Clinton would even want the position. And some wondered if the Obama camp – which is very disciplined about unwanted leaks – is simply trying to compliment her by suggesting she's in the running.
If she wants to keep the options open for another run, she'll turn down the offer — if it comes.
One of the many fine projects of Soldiers' Angels is Project Valour-IT. It provides voice-activated/adaptive laptop computers to troops recovering from hand and other severe injuries. To date, it's provided over 2700 laptops, and recently expanded its program to offer other technology items that aid injured troops with their recovery and independence.
DoD caseworkers and Soldiers' Angels representatives at many military medical centers continue to identify patients in need of such support. But the cupboard is about empty. Project Valour-IT desperately needs funds to continue its fine work.
To help raise the much-needed funds, a number of bloggers are engaged in a friendly competition. We sign up for the team representing the service branch of our choice, and compete to be the team that raises the most money. Once again, I've joined the Army team in memory of my dad, the late Col. Samuel R. Combs, who "answered his country's call even before the phone rang."
Please click the Project Valour-IT banner on the left and contribute to the project via the Army team. The competition runs through Thanksgiving. Right now, we're far in the lead, having raised almost as much as the other service branches combined. But Navy is coming on strong, and as I recall, they edged us out at the end last year. So please add a few bucks to the Army total by clicking that contribution banner right now.
Donating is quick, easy, and painless, and even if you can only spare five or ten bucks, you can help to really make a difference for men and women who've suffered a lot defending our freedom and safety.
The Bridge of the Imams connects the Adhamiya and Kadhimiya neighborhoods of Baghdad, named for mediaeval Sunni and Shi'ite holy men whose landmark shrines on opposite sides of the Tigris are surrounded by homes of members of the separate communities.
It had been closed since 2005 when rumors of a suicide bombing panicked thousands of Shi'ites crossing the bridge for a pilgrimage to the Kadhimiya shrine. About one thousand people died in that stampede, clogging the river below with corpses.
But on Tuesday Sunni children from Adhamiya raced to see their Shi'ite friends in Kadhimiya. Women from the two communities met up on the bridge, kissing and hugging each other with joy.
"When the faces met, the lips smiled, hands shook, bodies hugged, the tears flowed out of joy. This is the Iraqi citizen," said Sheikh Ahmed al-Samaraie, head of Iraq's Sunni Endowment, which runs Sunni religious offices and mosques in Iraq.
A banner across the bridge read: "The bridge of love and reconciliation between the people of Adhamiya and Kadhimiya."
Officials said the event was a sign that the sectarian hatred that fueled years of violence in Iraq is ebbing away. The number of Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops killed last month was the lowest monthly toll since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
"This day is a remarkable day, a day of a great Iraq. The day of meeting, love, brotherhood, affinity … The day we proved to the whole world that we are one nation," Sayyid Salih al-Haidari, Samaraie's Shi'ite counterpart said in a speech. Delegations accompanying the two officials then went to pray together at a nearby mosque.
That's worth a tear of joy or two, don't you think?
HT: Instapundit, who observed that "Now that the election's over, we may get more of those!"
Take this claim with a grain of salt. It comes from a terrorist organization leader talking to an Arab newspaper, so it's only slightly more credible than a CBS News story about a National Guard memo. But Haaretz reported it:
The Arab daily Al-Hayat on Tuesday quoted a senior Hamas official as saying that United States President-elect Barack Obama's advisors met with members of the Palestinian militant group before the U.S. presidential election.
Ahmed Yusuf, a political advisor to Hamas' Gaza leader Ismail Haniyeh, reportedly told the London-based paper that, "The connection was made via email and after that we met with them in Gaza."
Al-Hayat reported that Yusuf also said the relations were maintained after Obama's electoral victory last Tuesday. He said the president-elect's advisors requested that the relations be kept secret so as not to aid his rival, Senator John McCain.
Well, that part has a certain ring of truth to it.
During Obama's campaign, he pledged that his administration would only hold talks with Hamas if it renounced terrorism, recognized Israel's right to exist, and abided by past agreements.
Maybe Hamas leaders secretly renounced terrorism and recognized Israel's right to exist in their emails to the Obama campaign? Yeah, right.
I've heard that Rahm Emmanuel is a strong supporter of Israel. If this story is true, I wonder what he thinks of it. I wonder if he knew about it.
BTW, if you see this reported in any American mainstream media outlets, drop a link in the comments. I tried searching Google News for obama hamas talks and obama hamas meet. I learned that, as Jerusalem Newswire put it, "Israel reverberates" with the news. But in the U.S. as of 10:30 PM Mountain Time, only Hot Air seemed interested.
UPDATE: P. David Hornik at PajamasMedia and Instapundit also noticed. Still waiting on the NYT, WaPo, AP, ABC, CBS, NBC, …
To those who have served, and to those who serve today:
Thank you
It Is The Soldier
It is the Soldier, not the minister Who has given us freedom of religion.
It is the Soldier, not the reporter Who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the Soldier, not the poet Who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer Who has given us freedom to protest.
It is the Soldier, not the lawyer Who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is the Soldier, not the politician Who has given us the right to vote.
It is the Soldier who salutes the flag, Who serves beneath the flag, And whose coffin is draped by the flag, Who allows the protester to burn the flag.
On this Veterans Day, please make a contribution to an organization (or two or three!) that supports veterans or active-duty military personnel. Such as Project Valour-IT to help severely wounded soldiers. Please click on the Make a Donation button at the top of the left sidebar and help me help the Army team in this friendly inter-service rivalry for a good cause. The competition runs through Thanksgiving.
While catching up on Big Lizards, I learned some other interesting things about the election. The first post debunked the myth of a big surge in registrations and new voters. It seems that, for the umpteenth time, media pundits were wrong about this being the year when young people would finally flock to the polls.
According to Dafydd, most of the new registrations (8.7 million out of 10 million) are explained by the population increase since 2004. Of the 1.3 million "extra" registrations, only about 300,000 showed up to vote — 0.2% of the vote (emphasis in original):
Bottom line: New voters, felons, and bums did not impact the vote in any significant way. ACORN failed; Obama won the election not by bringing "new blood" to the voting booth but by doing a better job than McCain at wooing the traditional voter, the guys and gals who always vote.
So if McCain didn't lose because of a surge of new voters, which traditional voters cost him the election? According to Dafydd, it was conservatives. He quoted the Associated Press (which I won't do, since they don't recognize fair use and have threatened those who don't pay them for quotes): according to exit polls, they said, the percentage of voters calling themselves conservative was the same as four years ago.
Dafydd then argued (emphasis in original):
Let's hop aboard my Syllogismobile and go for a ride…
34% of voters called themselves "conservatives."
Of that 34%, 20% voted for Barack H. Obama; that means 6.8% of the electorate both called themselves conservatives and also voted for Obama. (Would that include Christopher Buckley and his ilk?)
Contrariwise, only 10% of self-dubbed liberals voted for John S. McCain. Conservatives defected at twice the rate of liberals.
Suppose, just for a giggle, conservatives had only voted for Obama at the same percentage that liberals voted for McCain… in other words, that conservatives were no more likely to defect than liberals. In that case, half of the conservative defectors would have remained loyal, and 3.4% of votes would shift from Obama to McCain.
According to the most recent quasi-official unofficial tally, the popular tallies for the two nominees were 52.6% for Obama and 46.1% for McCain.
Switching 3.4% from left to right yields 49.2% for Obama and 49.5% for McCain. (Note McCain number higher than Obama number.)
Conclusion: Had conservatives defected at the same rate as liberals, instead of twice the rate, then John McCain would have won this election.
Thanks, guys!
That's a bit of over-simplification. It looks only at the popular vote, not the Electoral College — which would make the analysis much more complicated. But as a rough approximation, it sounds about right. It's very likely that Christopher Buckley and those like him elected Obama.
Bill Buckley is spinning so fast in his grave that it may warp the space-time continuum.
It's a serious question: If a candidate like John S. McCain can be beaten by an empty suit with no experience spouting policies that "seem vague but are in fact meaningless," then what the heck are we supposed to do in order to win next time?
Surprisingly enough, I'll tell you what we should do. So there.
It's a long, thoughtful, and comprehensive post, covering both general strategic principles and tactical specifics. There's no way to summarize it or condense it into a few excerpts. You really need to read the whole thing. Especially if you have any influence (local or national) in the Republican Party.
Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr got half a million votes. It's not the million-plus his supporters had hoped for, or the 922,000 that Ed Clark got in 1980 (the Libertarian high-water mark). But it's the second-best Libertarian showing, besting Harry Browne's 485,000 in 1996 and Ron Paul's 431,000 in 1988.
According to Newsmax, Barr is pleased with his showing. And it looks like he cost McCain North Carolina:
When The Associated Press declared Obama the winner in the state, he had a 13,693-vote edge over McCain. By then Barr had already tallied more than 25,200 votes in North Carolina, according to the Boston Globe.
Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia, is thought to have siphoned far more votes from McCain than from Obama.
No Democratic presidential candidate had won North Carolina since Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976.
For a time, Barr was also the difference in Indiana. With almost all precincts reporting, he had 1.1 percent of the vote while Obama had 49.9 percent and McCain had 49 percent. In the end, however, Obama totaled 50 percent, McCain 49 percent, and Barr 1 percent.
“This is just the beginning of the new Libertarian Party,” Barr said in a statement.
“In these next four years, there will be an even greater need for a political party fully dedicated to lower taxes, smaller government, and more individual freedom — a voice for liberty.”
I certainly agree with that! If only the Libertarians didn't have their heads in the sand regarding the Islamofascist enemies of Western Civilization.
I admit I gave up on the Broncos after that pitiful first half and switched channels. Hey, CSI was on! But thanks to the DVR, I was able to watch the fourth-quarter comeback later.
That was a pretty gritty victory. Cutler looked impressive for the first time in a while. Brandon Marshall redeemed himself (and was prevented from doing something truly stupid and costly after his TD by teammate Brandon Stokley). And a bunch of unknown backups filling in for the growing list of injured players rose to the occasion.
I swear, I think the Broncos' only remaining running back is some guy they found jogging along the Cuyahoga River just before kickoff.
I've got to say, though, that Browns coach Romeo Crennel seems to have done the right thing by benching Derek Anderson. That Brady Quinn is a pretty impressive kid. Keep an eye on him. I'm just glad Winslow inexplicably let that fourth-down pass slip through his fingers.
The pundits, including many conservative pundits, are opining that Obama will "govern from the center." Sure he will. That's why he picked a hard-core leftist, rabidly partisan pit bull, Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, as his chief of staff.
Emmanuel made it quite clear after the 2006 election how interested he is in reaching across the aisle and ending the partisanship in Washington: "The Republicans can go fuck themselves!"
I suspect a number of blue-blood country-club Republican politicians will be only too eager to go fuck themselves in order to demonstrate how bipartisan and cooperative they can be.
Oh, yeah — Emmanuel was on the board of Freddie Mac when it was creating our current financial crisis, and he helped Steny Hoyer manipulate the Congressional bailout plan voting so as to maximize the PR damage to the Republicans. (HT: Sweetness & Light)
