And in the movie of the same name,
the part of SARAH PALIN
will be played by TINA FEY:

[UPDATED]

CONVENTION,
DAY FIVE....

NO, WAIT! WAKE UP! IT'S OVER!


AND IT'S....













PALIN!!!!

I've known very little about Alaska governor Sarah Palin, though she sounded like an interesting choice for Veep. As of this morning I read one thing-- her Wikipedia bio -- and watched a couple of minutes of two videos of her on the Kudlow business show, and was prompted to write the following to a knowledgeable but dubious friend:

How can you read that Wiki bio and compare her to Barack "all my years were Lost Years" Obama? If any bio of Obambi were that meaty, it would have to be a detailed intimate tale of Saul Alinsky-inspired, grant-based boondoggling, partnered with terrorist Ayers, on behalf of programmes aimed at destroying education in that gleaming urban success story and shooting gallery, Chicago (city of my birth)-- a big ball of nothing, all of it while sucking on the teat of the Chicago boss-machine. We would see a thin list of legislative initiatives in Illinois all aimed at making life more comfortable for black criminals and more brief for unborn children.

Palin, of whom I knew nothing till reading the Wiki stuff, sounds to me like a real old Wild West sheriff who comes into town with six-guns blazing and quickly populates the local Boot Hill with the corpses of scumbags. I am SO glad it isn't the strange and oily Romney (who spent like a drunk and managed to set few people on fire during the primaries) or the slightly fey Pawlenty (who's probably a good guy, but indistinguishable from a thousand other good guys) or Lieberman (totally right on maybe two things, and whacko left on everything else, except those good things like school vouchers which he sold down the river when nominated for veep). I like it.

I know it will be viewed by many as a gimmick or stunt, but that will subside when they hear her on the stump. (I've been watching videos of her on Kudlow.) She's pro-oil, pro-life & family, pro-reform (much more effectively than McCain), and full of American pioneer spirit. Being female is a bonus, but not her most interesting or exciting quality. I like it.

Then again, my mind could be total hog-slop after watching the Dems for four days.....

P.S. Canadians should consider this a Very Good Thing.

PALIN' BY COMPARISON:

The Krauthammer weighs in with this succinct and pummeling summary of last night's Obamapalooza at the Barackopolis. Money quote:

The oddity of this convention is that its central figure is the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby. The palpable apprehension is that the anointed is a stranger — a deeply engaging, elegant, brilliant stranger with whom the Democrats had a torrid affair. Having slowly woken up, they see the ring and wonder who exactly they married last night.

Ever-so-slightly-right-of-center pundit David Brooks dares to scar the pages of the New York Times with the speech to the delegates that the DNC forgot to schedule. Money quote:

We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”

One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely...

For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are.

HEH.

On a serious note, last May Nat Hentoff was prescient about the virtues of the Palin pick. Read it here.


PALIN/JINDAL IN 2012!!!

MATTHEW MODINE APPLAUDS

... which is a good thing, because I might fall asleep: this is WAY less exciting than either Bill or Hillary. Mr. O has promised to tap more natural gas -- he's got a head-start by having tapped Joe Biden for the two-spot.

Did I tell you he said we'd have safe toys?

Things are ratcheting up a bit now, since he's rolling out the promi$e$. All very, as 'twere, 'conventional'. He just acknowledged that it will all cost money, but he's going to pay for it by carving off the bureaucracy. Good luck with that.

He's ridin' the absent fathers now -- that's good.

Just challenged McCain to a debate about the "temperament and judgement to be Commander-in-Chief" -- good luck with that, too. Said McCain "won't even follow Bin Laden to the cave he lives in." Oh, Johnny Mac is going to be smokin' at that one! On this subject, Mr. O falls off his boilerplate and right into the total B.S. quagmire -- what garbage, distortion, drivel.

"I've got news for you, John McCain: we ALL put our country first." By not voting to fund the troops?

"Change doesn't come from Washington -- it comes to Washington." Or it does both, on the train, every day from Washington to Delaware. He keeps saying stuff that reflects worse on Biden than on McCain.

We have arrived at the Martin Luther King moment. And we're marching into the future, with Scripture, and stuff.

As the Church Lady might put it: "Well. Isn't that special." Yes and no.

Camera finds Matthew Modine again. Guess it's hard to find all the celebrities in a crowd of 85K. Whoa -- fireworks. Okeefine.

Oddly over-earnest music seems to have poured cold water on the crowd's excitement. Wrap-up voices (is that Nancy Pelosi I hear?) trying to re-kindle it-- 'Born in the USA' may help.


On the whole, a bit flat, and the audience under-reacted appropriately. It was a fun 'happening'-- will he respect us in the morning?

CONVENTION,
DAY FOUR

HE-E-E-Y JOE!
WHERE YOU GOIN' WITH THAT GUN IN YOUR HAND?

Last night 36-year Senator Joe Biden stood on the convention stage in Denver and rolled out a list of insults and outright lies about his 25-year colleague John McCain.

The McCain campaign let everyone know that they were releasing a new ad to run on the final night of the Democratic convention, and it was wondered whether this would be one of the lightning counterstrikes that the McCain crowd has been getting better and better at, especially in view of the hatchet job that McCain, and the Bush administration, had been subject to last night.

Surprise.

Here it is.



Hope you made your cute little mother proud last night, Joe. Very classy.

CONVENTION,
DAY THREE

IT'S A DONE DEAL

I wish I could celebrate quite as much as Juan Williams, but he's a respectable man so we'll take him at his word about the electrifying significance of Obama's nomination for the Presidency.

I really do wish it -- I wish Obama was "the guy" whose accomplishments and biography showed him to be worthy of both the political and personal plaudits now being lavished upon him. But sorry -- he's not. This celebration is a dreary pageant which is about one thing only, and that is race. His nomination is fundamentally unserious, and if he should win the election, the consequences of an unserious administration will be devastating, far beyond the borders of one nation. It's a sad thing.

I wish it were otherwise. What I really wish is that this moment -- certainly a milestone in history, unfortunately diminished by a lightweight candidate -- were given its due context, that of a long and rich story of progress in America for the descendants of slaves (which Obama, of course, is not). There is far too much rhetoric, from the candidate himself and even moreso from his wife and his circle of unsavoury associates, painting the rise of Barack Obama to the apex of American power as if it has come like an unprecedented shot from out the deep, mirey chasm of centuries of entrenched racial discrimination and oppression.

Poppycock. And such an insult to his forebears, who DID ascend to places of honour only by punching their way through nearly insurmountable barriers. It's been more than a century since black pioneers, close upon the heels of slavery, fought their way into the ranks of teachers, doctors, the military, and the Catholic clergy, just to name a few. Later came politics (local and national), law enforcement, and the military officer class, among other things.

Barack Obama stands on the shoulders, at the very least, of Thurgood Marshall -- and what ingratitude it betrays that neither Obama nor his liberal disciples can bring themselves to acknowledge the continuing historic significance of Marshall's successor on the court, Clarence Thomas, plus two black Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Condi Rice, one of whom was also Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All four of these exceptional people have life stories of genuine struggle and perseverance against tremendous odds, beside which the Obama biography of prep school and political opportunism pales by comparison.

Yes, we have the first (real) black nominee for President -- an office not so many breaths above those that have been held by these minority achievers who preceded him. It has been a slow but gradual -- not sudden, overnight -- ascent to the mountaintop.


Convention wrap-up:
Some woman nominated Hillary "in the name of all women" -- excuse me? As the anti-war thumpers would say, "NOT IN MY NAME!!!"

Could someone tell me why THIS scary woman (left) DNC Secretary Alice Travis Germond, wearing her Washington, D.C. helmet-head of hair, is somehow Ms. Cool for the Democrats,

















but Katherine Harris (right), Florida Secretary of State in 2000, was vilified, ridiculed, and trashed by the party of feminism for having bad hair, make-up, and the gall to rule against Gore.

Just askin'.


The first "spiritually" (or whatever) black President, Bill Clinton, has just delivered his usual mysteriously captivating oratory and was a good soldier, giving a vacuous and platitudinous but highly charged endorsement of Obama, without sacrificing the opportunity to ooze his charm from every pore and remind everyone how terrific he is. He donated one unwitting gift to the Republicans by reminding us that even he was considered too young and inexperienced to be Commander-in-Chief in 1992. He was. [read it here]

The Biden video, and even his handsome son, have just produced some interesting fictions: Obama tells us that he spoke out against some vague aspect of the Iraq war, and Biden himself rails about an unnecessary war and an abuse of power (so why'd you vote for it, Joe?), and then Barack assures us that Joe's best quality is his honesty (except when he's borrowing not only the words but the life of British pol Neil Kinnock).

Certain aspects of Biden's biography are indeed compelling and tragic -- but the damage he has done, especially his repugnant conduct of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has had tragic consequences for way more than one family. Beau Biden (a National Guard captain heading for Iraq in October -- good on him!) has asked something of me that no other political campaigner ever has: would I please "be there" for Barack and his dad. The Therapeutic Culture triumphs! E-e-e-e-e-w-w-w-w.

Biden is going all Evangelical with an antiphon/refrain thingy ("that's not change, that's more of the same"). Bo-ring. It's murky and peripatetic. Now Biden just got snotty about the "claim" that things are better in Iraq and that's why we don't hear about it. Then he recites a litany of how McCain was wrong on Iraq and Obama was right. He doesn't think his ""good friend" John McCain had enough parts of his body twisted up like a pretzel, he has to do the same to his record and his character? Feeling that bayonet again, John? In the back? BIZARRE!!!!!!!!!! I think Joe may live to eat those silly words. [Mirengoff at Powerline puts it all together.]

Finally he goes right up over the top with "Remember when the world used to trust us? With Barack Obama they'll trust us again." YEE-HAAAAAAA!!! Boil that boilerplate! We've all been knocked down, but we'll get up again. Cue CHUMBAWAMBA:




At last -- The Messiah has arrived in the building: Re-cap of major speeches (successful or oherwise.) Explaining why he will be doing the Superbowl Halftime thing tomorrow. Apparently it all started with a "simple idea." Hm-m-m-m-m.

What are they calling the Greek temple stage now?

-- Temple of Obamacles
-- The O-cropolis
-- My Big Fat Greek Acceptance Speech
-- Barackolis

(hat-tip: National Review/the Campaign Spot)

May I add?:

-- Circus Taximus
-- Par-Olympus
-- Pant-theon (pant, pant, pant)
-- Come-and-seum
-- Animal House II

Biden seems to have a large, cute family, especially his mom.

I wonder what colour the sky is in his world.

DETAILS LEAKED ON OBAMA
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH VENUE






Only slightly exaggerated:

[hat-tips: Political Inquirer via PowerLine]




But before we get there,
KEEP AN EYE OUT
FOR THAT I.E.D.
IN THE ROAD

It's the Bubba bomb.













O Mama.



No kiddin'. [click pic for site]




Can you spell.......?


Stay tuned.

CONVENTION, DAY TWO


THERE'S LIFE IN THE OLD GIRL [Holy Mother Church] YET!

FAUX CATHOLIC, SPEAKRESS PELOSI, GETS THE EPISCOPAL SMACKDOWN FOR BUTCHERING CHURCH TEACHING ON ABORTION

Nancy Pelosi is "an ardent, practicing Catholic" -- except when she's not. I believe it's a principle of physics that two objects cannot occupy the same space, so let's be clear that an ardent Catholic and an advocate of abortion license cannot occupy the same human body. One or the other of those entities must be exorcised. There's nothing the least bit remarkable about Pelosi's spiritual bankruptcy; self-induced laetae sententiae excommunicate Catholics are a dime a dozen, especially among the political class. [Democratic Veepster Joe Biden is just such another.]

What must be called remarkable, though, is the committed and confident abject ignorance on display as Pelosi assured NBC interviewer-emeritus Tom Brokaw that, in 2000 years, the Church had never quite been able to make a definitive pronouncement about when an embryonic human acquires the status of a being with rights. Even Senator [OOPS!] Saint Augustine put it at 3 months' gestation -- so we don't know, right? So, like, whatever! -- we err on the side of caution elimination.

WHOOOOSH-H-H-H! [sound of men in moiré satin and lace swooping down like a stooping falcon] This is a job for SUPER-BISHOP!!!

First out of the chute, Archbishop Chaput (and his auxiliary, Bishop Conley), right handy there in Denver, who issued a well-crafted letter and catechetical slap to Madame Speaker, less for her benefit than for those whose perception of Catholic teaching may have been blindsided by Pelosi's brain-droppings. Full text is here with The Rest Of The Story, as well as the words of the FOUR other bishops who followed his lead: Rigali and Egan (Cardinals), Lori, and Wuerl. KABOOM!!

It's been a tough week for San Fran Gran Nan. First she makes an first-class ass of herself (yet again) by barking about how we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels by using more natural gas. (Uh, yeah. Ya see, Nan, yer natural gas is way down there where da oil is -- it works kinda like this.) Then she gets her moment in the sun at the convention (blink, blink, blink in the sun) only to burble and blabble in the late afternoon while absolutely nobody was listening. Which is just as well, since she gave so much evidence of how firmly planted she is in her little parallel universe. Then she runs afoul of a surprisingly fleet-footed Catholic hierarchy ready to read her the riot act. It's enough to make anybody's facial stitches pop.


HALLOWEEN IS TWO MONTHS AWAY,
BUT THE GREAT PUMPKIN HAS LANDED:

HILLARY'S IN AN ORANGE PANTSUIT,
AND SHE'S LIT UP INSIDE

The orange is actually a well-calculated choice, against the electric blue background -- classic colour theory. She's stealing the show pretty good, with her slightly re-worked stump speech (starting with her 35 years of experience-- as opposed to, oh, you know....) Bio video and speech are almost entirely the story of her campaign, very little else about her life before that. Old Hillary campaign signs were very little in evidence. Then she started speaking, and a whole new genre of signs -- a more personal look, consisting of her signature -- and there were hundreds of them, waving to the rhythm thunderous cheers.

Michelle looked pretty sour through the speech, until about half an hour in, when Hillary finally got around to mentioning who's really running for President. Odd-- Michelle at least got an acknowledgement that she'd be great for her perspective job. Barack got nothing that enthusiastic. Everybody's jazzed -- about Hillary, the historic woman -- who did a pretty good job of delivering tired campaign boiler-plate. She's learned not to shriek. That's a good thing. Obambi probably should have picked her, and knows it better now than he did at lunch today. I'm glad he didn't.

Hillary came to the hall this evening as a "proud mother, Democrat, Senator, American, and Barackista." Um.... let's see now. Proud........wife? Nah. Barack ain't the only one who got nudged to the margins. On a general note -- why do Democrats always have to lie so much? Just askin'.




Hey, Barack. I know you think you shouldn't take your eyes off her. But looks who's coming up behind.

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION --
DAY ONE

MICHELLE'S EXTREME MAKEOVER
PRONOUNCED "COMPLETE"

Banal and corny, soft and sweet, standard laundry-list, anger more-or-less in check, more about the promise of the future than the stale tale of our common victimization (or the perpetual whine about their damn college loans)....... who was that woman anyway??!!!

A little kiss-up to Hillary, a good scrub-a-dub for Barack, a little fog-machine on her own previous declarations.

Oh, and note to file, Mrs. O: I really don't want to hear you talking like you can relate to the military families with the empty chair at the table. Spare me -- I'm not buyin'.

Anyhoo -- she did her job. Moving on........


UNDENIABLE: TED KENNEDY LOOKED AMAZING
FOR A MAN FACING DEATH.

Maybe that's just the natural effect of being in a room where he could suck up the narcotic of public adulation with which he has benumbed the nerve-ends of basic humanity all his life. His words were the usual windbaggery; the video made unfortunate reference to his way of sailing over waters in which the innocent have drowned. He was treated with a fawning deference which mocked the tremendous damage his career of corrosive demagoguery and way-out leftism have inflicted upon the body politic (not least upon the bodies of the defenseless unborn).

Unfortunately he hasn't figured out why he's still thumping for the same government health care he has promised for the past 40 years or so: because year in, year out, so many many people know it just won't work.

I have written my anticipatory obituary for him, which will be food for another day. Sufficient unto the day is to remark that he did well and looked well in coming to the gathering of his tribe.


NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE:
THAT LUMPY OLD BAG

Speakress of the House San Fran Gran Nan Pelosi (whom I watched for a minute or so till I could watch no more, averting mine eyes from the train wreck) was particularly wooden and vacuous. E-e-e-e-w-w-w-w.


OTHER REVOLTING BAGGAGE: JIMMUH.

The Worst President of the Twentieth Century, if not All of History showed his face. I didn't stick around. Rosalyn was wearing a nice pant-suit.


Counting down the days.

GERMANS LOVE OBAMA -- CAN'T VOTE

IRAQIS HATE BIDEN -- CAN'T VOTE

All for the best, I guess, but.......

I always had the feeling that Gibberin' Joe Biden's plan for a tripartite division of Iraq along sectarian lines had been hatched without the least interest in what the Iraqis wanted for themselves -- even if it might possibly work, it was still something an American had no business advocating within the American Congress.

Now we know that the Iraqis were keeping an eye on Joe too, and were in complete agreement with me. (I always had the feeling a lot of them were pretty smart....)

Reuters (of all people!) reports the story. Money Quote Music to mine ears:

Senator Joe Biden may be one of the only U.S. politicians that can get Iraq's feuding Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish politicians to agree. But not in a good way.

"This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq," Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters. "We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time."

Tigerhawk weighs in with his take:

Anyway, it is a reflection of the diminishing political significance of the Iraq war that Barack Obama, who secured the Democratic nomination in part by making much of his opposition to the war and his plan to withdraw our troops on a fast schedule, is now able to pick as his running mate a senator who voted for the invasion in 2002 and whose favored "solution" would have required more rather than less American involvement in Iraqi domestic politics.

Duh.

"We rejected his proposal when he announced it..." Funny, I don't recall hearing that on Anderson Cooper 180 or reading it from the Paper of Record. Funny.

Maybe next time Joe will remember to ask them first.

Woe to those who would hide their plans too deep for the LORD! Who work in the dark, saying, "Who sees us, or who knows us?"
[Isaiah 29:15]

It's midnight in the District of Columbia, and...

IT'S BIDEN!!!!


Yes, the Obamaniacs have been hard at work in the dark of night, and Dems, you got yourself a Veepsteak.

Oh, and if you're one of the loyal acolytes who signed up to be the "First to Know" via text or email from Barack Obama (still on offer at the Obama website), you are so S.O.L., my friends -- your message should arrive some time tomorrow morning, but the Really Important People (the press) were the Real First To Know, and they beat you by hours. Perhaps you didn't read the fine print at the bottom of the page, that says you have to cough up money or perform some other act of service for the campaign in order to get what you thought was offered to you freely. (See convention tickets, etc.)

Delaware Senator Joe Biden --
just five years younger than John McCain, elected to the Senate when Barry Obama was 10 years old -- has been chosen to be the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate. Once infamous for having plagiarized a speech (not to mention plagiarizing his forehead hair from some other part of his body), Biden is now much more famous for his own words -- by the score. His chronic oral diarrhea has made an ass of him in more forums than one can count, most memorably in the confirmation hearings of Republican-nominated Supreme Court Justices.

Political humorist Andy Borowitz predicted a few days ago that, anticipating the nod, Biden had already "prepared a 50,000 word acceptance speech" to begin on Wednesday and close on Thursday.

Jonah Goldberg at NationalReviewOnline calls the choice "an outright terrible decision," and reminds us that "Biden is such a gasbag he makes the Hindenburg look like a sack of rocks." Not content to gift us with this new bon mot, Goldberg resurrects his September '05 assessment of the man (whom he actually kind of likes):

He says interesting things, from time to time. I think he makes a fair point here and there...What's fascinating — and what might be distracting some folks from seeing his underlying-yet-occassional smarts — is that he lets his ego and vanity get in the way. The man loves his voice so much, you'd expect him to be following it around in a grey Buick, in defiance of restraining order, as it walks home from school. He seems to think his teeth are some kind of hypnotic punctuation marks which can momentarily disorient the listener and absolve him from any of Western civilization's usual imperatives to stop talking.

Listening to him speechify is like playing an intellectual game of whack-a-mole where every now and then the fuzzy head of a good point pops up from the tundra but before you can pin it down, he starts talking about how he went to the store and saw a squirrel on the way and it was brown which brings to mind Brown V. Board of Ed which most people don't understand because [TEETH FLASH] he taught Brown in his law school course and [TEETH FLASH] Mr. Chairman I'm going to get right to it and besides these aren't the droids you're looking for...

[hat-tip, Obiwan Kenobi -- emphases: mine]

But while we're all chuckling at the prospect of two hot air balloons trying to occupy the same platform, it's worth remembering that two years ago Biden proposed a "solution" to the strife in Iraq which was manifestly disastrous, and he's still being treated like it was a serious proposal -- in fact, even in the past half-hour there have already been suggestions that the hard-won resolutions arrived at this year in Iraq actually bear some resemblance to the three-way religio/ethnic ghetto-izing Biden had recommended. Dennis Byrne of the Chicago Tribune summed it up pretty well at the time-- money quote:

Just as the Iraqis were finally putting together a unity government, along comes Sen. Joseph Biden with a "detailed plan" to unravel it.

Brilliant.

As brilliant as Abraham Lincoln preparing a detailed plan to end the Civil War upon the fall of Vicksburg.

Just like Sara Lee, it seems that nobody doesn't like Joe Biden. But he is nevertheless dangerously dumb where smartness is required for survival. Many a Republican/conservative considers this choice (and the blabbering dumbness) of Biden a gift in this election cycle, and happily say "Bring it on." If the survival of the species were not dependent on these things, this could be nothing but fun. The Democratic ticket could be the gaffe that keeps on gaffing.

Anyway, Biden should enjoy himself as he runs for office on the promise of "CHANGE" (having spent 36 years in Washington), hand-in-glove with that fella he once admired for being "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy -- I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Kinda gets ya'-- rightcheer.

On the other hand, Jim Geraghty at NRO has a revealing round-up of some of Biden's less-than-complimentary assessments of his new running mate, now on record. F'rinstance, in December of '07, Joe was heard to opine: “When this campaign is over, political slogans like ‘experience’ and ‘change’ will mean absolutely nothing. The next president has to act.” [hat-tip YidWithLid]

Well, this is as close as Ol' Joe is ever gonna get to the West Wing office. This team is not gonna get the gold-- and not because their opponents are underage!!!!

OBAMA WANTS TO TRAVEL
ON A FINE CHINESE TRAIN

JUSTIN SAYS "YOU CAN HAVE IT"

[I fixed about a dozen typos -- Justin had had a hard day]

The train was unbelievable, I don't know where to start.

We climbed onto the carriage with our rucksacks to a sight of hoards of Chinese sitting, standing, hanging and perching everywhere imaginable. Everybody stopped talking as the 2 aliens (thankfull pretty wasted by this point) made their way down the carriage to their seat, pushing, climbing, even standing on the locals to sqeeze through.

Once seated a crowd gathered around us just staring with the occasional comment in Chinese. After about an hour of this we got talking to a local boy and spent the next few hours drinking more and helping him speak English, by the end he was fully fluent in almost 6 swear words and our job was done.

Did I mention that every other minute someone is coughing up phlegm which either goes straight onto the floor with the discarded newspapers/ciggarette ash/cashew nuts/locals who couldn't afford a seat, or gets launched out the window with an amazing noise that I've grown to love.

Night time comes so it's time to sleep...yeah right. Even with a travel pillow and a an eye mask it's impossible. Either the food trolley is rammed down the aisle into your leg every 30 minutes, or a local is leaning on top of you snoring (thankfuly they don't dribble), or someone with a megaphone (yes really, at 3am this morning) is standing in the carriage selling socks or newspapers or horns are blowing and at 2am the fella behind me went through his entire polyphonic ringtone collection...twice.

Glad to be off the train but it was certainly an experience. We are shattered.

[Yeah, I know, it was 2005. But my reliable source told the same story just a year ago.]


THINK THE OBAMESSIAH WOULD ENJOY THESE ARRANGEMENTS? :

I signed up to get Barack Obama's Veep announcement, and all I got was this lousy donation solicitation notice.

Colour me shocked.

I'M AS FAMOUS AS AN UNNAMED PERSON CAN BE --

POWERLINE STANDS CORRECTED

The Powerline blog ran this hilarious concocted video, but misattributed the source to the Pythons' Life of Brian. I steered them toward Franco Zefferelli, and my quips made their front page [fer a minute].





BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE --
BUT CLOTHES DON'T MAKE THE MAN

Apparently the U.S. Army can no longer repress its uniform envy, and will be opting to make their Dress Blues the standard uniform, reflecting the extremes of their Marine-Corps-wannabe status.


Good luck with that, guys.



"Flight attendants, final cross-check...."

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE REAL WORLD....

Hear that munching sound? The world's termites and maggots are busily nibbling away at the edges of mankind's well-being -- pretty much as we left things when we headed off for more pleasant horizons:





Yeah, I know everybody on the web is using it, but it's kind of irresistable:


Bring the good old bugle, boys,
we'll sing another song
Sing it with a spirit that
will start the world along
Sing it as we used to sing it, 50,000 strong
While we were marching through Georgia.

Chorus
Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!
So we sang the chorus from [Ossetia] to the sea
While we were marching through Georgia.

I do recall feeling my gag reflex way back when George Bush looked into Vlad the Impaler Putin's eyes and saw a good soul, or whatever the heck it was. What misgivings I had about John McCain have receded proportionally upon hearing about his other [besides the Surge] moment of prescience:

While it's all looking very bleak, at least we can see a glimmer of hope in the powerful words of Georgian President Saakashvili. Perennial genial lightweight Glenn Beck seems to have developed a rapport with the Saak-man, and let him rip for an hour on a recent show. (a Youtube 3-parter)





MEGA-CHURCHER WARREN HOSTS A
PORPOISE-DRIVEN DEBATE

Normally I have nothing but suspicion toward mega-church enterprises, but California's Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren seems benign enough, and I'm told that his mega-selling book A Purpose-Driven Life is not without substance.

So Warren invited the two presumptive presidential nominees to separate but equal public interviews on matters of faith and principle. Each was to have the opportunity to answer the same questions without knowledge of how the other responded.

I didn't watch it. Frankly, I'm not all that interested in the faith-related musings of either candidate -- McCain seems a nice enough guy with a nominal attachment to some Protestant community, but I would characterize his mode of expression as pretty much the stuff of the American secular religion: God not particularly distinguished from Country. Obama's religious associations, no matter how much he tries to distance himself from them, are throughly repugnant, and I could never consider anything he has to say on matters theological or spiritual to be anything but tainted and twisted at the root.

I needn't have worried, since at his most reflective he declared one of the defining public policy issues of the modern age to be both theologically and scientifically "above his pay grade." Unfortunately the cool dude from Illinois didn't seem to grasp that big public policy issues have a way of insisting that we craft some kind of legal "specificity" to best keep peace and order in society, and THAT, Mr. Obama, is within the presidential and legislative pay grades -- the buck stops in the District of Columbia.

Obama's attempt at sudden (and thoroughly implausible) humility in the face of a great moral question has only succeeded in keeping alive a hot-button political issue which the feminist left thought it had successfully aborted (as 'twere), thereby resuscitating the appalling Obama record on the fate of infants accidentally born alive after an attempted abortion. For the sake of their mothers' theoretical womb-autonomy, Mr. Obama has supported the legalized manslaughter of the stubbornly alive newborn. And he has stood virtually alone, even among liberal Democrats, on this issue -- a rather distasteful variation on his status as "The One."

So if Nat Hentoff's characterization of Obama as "the Infanticide Candidate" a few months back hasn't quite stuck in the public mind, the pot has now been duly stirred by the Obamessiah's own pitifully clumsy evasiveness at the Saddleback forum. Obama's voting record on Born Alive Infant Protection and Partial Birth Abortion is the scummy bathwater he was hoping would get thrown out with the baby, but he seems to have accomplished yet another pratfall while treading in his own oil-slick.

God love him -- the gift that keeps on giving! Thanks to Mr. Obama's verbal contortionism, Rich Lowry at National Review is writing this, Paul Kengor at Political Mavens is writing this, and Kyle-Ann Shiver at American Thinker is writing this. Hey, Barry, thanks for the memory.

Obama's Saddleback performance was so poor that his campaign is now circulating far-fetched stories of McCain having access to both the questions and his rival's answers ahead of time -- because, as NBC's Andrea Mitchell observed, "he seemed so well prepared."

He was, Andrea.

FOUR YEARS AT THE NAVAL ACADEMY,
TWENTY-TWO YEARS IN THE MILITARY,
FIVE+ YEARS IN THE HANOI HILTON,
AND TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN THE U.S. SENATE
WILL DO THAT FOR YOU.

Not to mention having a moderately well-developed set of principles -- translation: you've figured out what the important stuff is, and have pretty much decided what you think about it.

Helps a lot in answering questions, Andrea. Helps you sound prepared.

NBC: still Koo-Koo for Cocoa Puff. (There, I said it.)


WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST!

That explains the close competition between American and Chinese female gymnasts, at what has turned out to be a pretty good Olympics hosted by Merry Maoists. Heck, the smog has cleared so much you can see across the street!

Still a bit foggy in record-keeping for the "Birthday Girls" however. The gymnastic coaches tell us that there are definite advantages to pulling off the required stunts when you've got a team of "pixies" as one called them. Last November's Xinhua Newspaper listed [now gold-medal winner] He Kexin as a promising "little girl" of 13 years old. By this summer her birthdate had jumped into the Way-
Back Machine and landed at January 1st (phew!) 1992.

Since the women[?]'s individual uneven bars gold medal was a numerical tie that had to be broken [by restoring dropped lowest scores and averaging to the thousandth of a point], it was of course pretty galling for grown woman almost-19-year-old American Nastia Liuken,to lose to overnight 16-year-old He Kexin. Hey, folks, that's why we call 'em Chi-Coms!

I'm with Jon Stewart on this one (colourful language alert!).




[Maybe if we keep kneeling down nobody will notice how teeny we are.]



Trying to look older than we really are: isn't that doing a reverse triple Pelosi in the tuck position?

AT LONG LAST

Olympic-sized kudos to Canada's Ian Millar, 61-year-old king of the mounted.


He's won so many compe- titions and been in so many Olympics (eight) I had not realized that he had no Olympic medal to show for it. The Canadian team won their silver, the first national medal in 40 years.

Sad that Millar could not share this long-awaited prize with his wife and pardner, Lynn, who died last year, after working by his side at the equestrian arts for more than three decades. The long and lanky horseman, with his seemingly perpetually sunny face, dedicated his medal to the angel he knew was riding with him.

Millar's long-time mount, the aptly-named Big Ben, didn't live to share the moment either. Strange that the magnificently huge horse never brought Millar Olympic glory -- though now that he's dead and isn't here to defend himself, we are given to understand that he could be a bit distracted by all the adulation and tended toward overconfidence!... Well, we can forgive him a little vanity.

Ben's friend In Style has carried Millar to glory at last -- extra measure of oats, please.

FRACK!!!!!

WE'RE BACK!

Sunday, 6 a.m. here:

Sunday, 6 p.m. (7:30 in Newfoundland) here:

ACK.

[P.S. If it's not frackin' obvious, number 1 son has now got us hooked on Battlestar Gallactica]

SEPARATED AT BIRTH:

Sen. Harry Reid *** Froggy from Our Gang
















[hat-tip: Monday afternoon caller to The Dennis Miller Show ]

IT'S BEEN A QUIET WEEK AT LAKE WOBEGON.....

But here in remotest Newfoundland, it's been a Newfie-palooza.

It was all work and no play for several weeks while house and garden underwent further transformations, much of it geared toward looking all pretty for the Unveiling of the Plaque, following our recent heritage restoration award.

Then, at the appointed moment, scores of the curious descended upon the old house on the cove, and sniffed out every nook and cranny to their satisfaction. Local political bigwigs made their little speeches, the little girl with the big voice sang Oh Canada, and Ode to Newfoundland, the veil was dropped, and the good times rolled.

Say, what's up at the big house?



Well, in the living room there was....



And in the dining room there was....



And in the kitchen there was....



Ya don't git one 'o these every day, eh b'y? It's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood.



MEANWHILE, BACK ON PLANET EARTH....

Satire was in fine fettle, both over the pond, from Gerard Baker at the Times of London:




And over at Scrappleface, where we'd expect nothing less: "McCain backs Timeline to get Obama Out of Iraq."


Even Letterman got into the act:




Yeah, I know I'm days behind the news curve -- we're a little slow out here at Lake Wobegon, b'gosh. Another ten days, and they'll be dragging me onto the plane back to civilization. Pass the Screech.