I hate to say it but...

Saw AMERICAN CAROL on the weekend, and it's --

LAME.

A sad wasted effort which could have been a killer. One of those comedies that shows its funniest moments in the trailers on TV.

Damn! I really wanted to howl, and savor, and whoop with glee at the skewering of the loony left. Instead, after the first ten minutes or so, I just kept tapping my foot waiting for the next laugh, and squirming at the primitive preachy-teachiness of the whole deal. Sigh. Waste of a good cast, a ready audience, and a good idea. It was day two of the film's run in Toronto, and we shared the theatre with six other people. Toodle-oo!


BACK IN THE REAL WORLD:
"THAT'S NOT THE ACORN I KNEW"?

OBAMA WEBSITE SCRUBS FALSE CLAIMS (i.e. LIES) ABOUT HIS TIES TO VOTE-FRAUD OUTFIT ACORN

The page used to look like this:


...but the facts have caught up with him, the page has been scrubbed, and the inconvenient truths chucked down the memory hole. That's because the real story goes like this:

In a 2004 article Case Study: Chicago- The Barack Obama Campaign in the journal Social Policy, Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes wrote :

Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends."

[This story has since been scrubbed from the Social Policy archives.]


ACORN got to work in battleground Ohio last February, with this bare-faced announcement:

GOTV for Obama! Ohio ACORN is doing a Get Out The Vote project with the OBAMA Campaign. Ohio ACORN is hiring canvassers to go door to door encouraging voters to vote for Barack Obama.

ACORN is hiring in Cleveland (216)431-3905, Columbus (614)425-9491, Cincinnati (513)221-1737, for Dayton (call Cincinnati), and for Toledo call Cleveland. Or email polnatoh@acorn.org and your inquiry will be routed to the appropriate person in each of these cities. Intake and training will be held daily at local ACORN offices. Canvass begins on Wednesday Feb. 27th and will work through election day. Please, only persons wishing to work all or most of these days (Saturday and Sunday included) should inquire.

Please do not contact the Obama campaign directly regarding this post as they are not the organization doing the hiring and it will only distract their staff and volunteers from the other important work they are doing on behalf of Senator Obama.

[emphasis mine]


That was then, this is NOW: JammieWearingFool gives the low-down as to how the Obama Campaign has funneled $800,000 to their ACORN friends to, um , get out the vote.




Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to steal an election. If there is any justice (if, if, if), this year's vote count could make the hanging chads of 2000 look like a cakewalk.


Big-Time Hat-tip to Gateway Pundit

AH, THE HITS JUST KEEP COMIN'!

I - CONNIE CHUNG Exposes Unrepentant Terrorists AYERS AND DOHRN for all the world to see (that includes you, Barack).

IN 1998.




II - OBAMA'S WEBSITE MAY DENY HIS TIES WITH VOTE-FRAUD EXPERTS ACORN,
but here's a thousand words to the contrary


These and a whole host of other election news nuggets at Gateway Pundit, who, amazingly, does not yet seem exhausted by the whole damn thing.


III - MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE GREAT WHITE NORTH

Canada too is having an election, in less than a week. Thank God the campaign season is legally restricted to about a six-week period, or the continent might go into Chernobyl mode. Especially when you see what passes for a party leader up here. Take a gander at what life might be like should the Liberal Party form the next government.



CTV is an indepedent broadcaster (unlike the notorious government organ, CBC). It's hard to tell whether this exchange points out Monsieur Dion's fundamental stupidity and obtuseness, or his notorious inability to speak or understand English. Neither speaks well of how this dude ended up leading the party of [the loathsome but nevertheless clever] Pierre Trudeau.

And people south of the 49th think THEY've got problems!

UNPROVABLE BUT PLAUSIBLE Updated (u-u-u-h-h...)

AND HARDLY A SURPRISE:

In an extended word and style analysis over at the respectable American Thinker, author Jack Cashill explores the likelihood that William Ayers ghost-wrote some or all of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father.

Why is this plausible? Because a man with a record of writing almost nothing at all, and none of it of note -- no articles in the Harvard Law Review of which he was editor, not a single publication during his years as a lawyer and lecturer in Constitutional Law -- was able to produce a polished literary memoir popped from the head of Zeus.

It was a memoir that nevertheless garnered little attention or sales at its 1995 debut, which makes it just a nanoparticle peculiar that, in his own 1997 book, Ayers refers to the obscure Illinois State Senator as a "writer." Wherefore? Hm-m-m.

Cashill's case is by no means conclusive, but is based on the kind of textual analysis to which many a more prestigious writer's works (say, Shakespeare) are routinely subjected.

Cashill fails to mention what, to me, is the most powerful argument against Obama's sole authorship: to the best of my knowledge, Dreams From My Father does not contain a single paragraph which reads

U-u-u-u-h..... e-r-r-r-r-r......eu-u-u-uh.......Look. Let's be clear.....u-u-u-u-m....... Wait, no, no, no.......U-u-u-h-h-h.......

I rest my case.



YOU THOUGHT WE WERE JUST JOSHIN',
BUT IT'S OFFICIAL:
BARACK IS THE MESSIAH

Calypso Louis Farrakhan, raving racist and anti-Semite nutbar, is caught by the crane-shot as he preaches to his flock:




Hey, can they do a crane-shot in your place of worship? Wowsers.

THIS JUST IN:

FIVE MILLION ILLEGAL ALIENS HOLD WORTHLESS SUB-PRIME MORTGAGES
-- AND THEY GOT THEM WITHOUT FUDGING A SINGLE QUESTION THEIR APPLICATIONS!

[Major-league hat-tip to Rush Limbaugh]

No surprises here. But remember, fellow-citizens and allies in the Western World (who stood in Berlin and cheered the Man-Child), when your portfolio and retirement funds are shadowy cookie jars with crumbs in the bottom, that this program was made possible by your friends in the American Democratic Party (with strategic assistance of handful of their 'friends across the aisle'), dating back to the Days of Malaise in Jimmuh Carter's 1970's.

THIS JUST IN from Journalist-to-the-World and boy genius MARK STEYN:

Cells taken from men's testicles seem as versatile as the stem cells derived from embryos.

Not mentioned in the article: Lewis and Clark, Giovanni Caboto, Christobal Colon, Marco Polo, and the Franklin Expedition have been drafted to go out in search of a race of men with the requisite resources.....


Read the rest here. Try not to squirm.

ECONOMIST THOMAS SOWELL EXPOSES
BARACK OBAMA'S
BANKRUPT EDUCATION MACHINATIONS

When push comes to shove, ChicagObama supports the status quo: ineffective teachers and an expensive, impotent school system.

That's the gist of Part IV. In the preceding instalment of his four-part series, Sowell gave a sharp snapshot of Obama's addiction to Senate pork, especially where it had a directly self-serving benefit.

The series started with a view of David Freddoso's Case Against Barack Obama , and moved on to the significance -- in regards to character, or perhaps "mettle"-- of Obama's (yes it's TRUE) belief that sex education for kindergartners is "the right thing to do." The theme of Sowell's 4-part series is the notion of the "real issues" -- something the pundits often talk about but fail to grasp.

Attention should be paid.

Not as spectacular as hanging around with terrorists or being nursed at the breast of hard-core communism or the race-grievance industry, but revealing and important nonetheless, and a more concrete basis on which to say NOBAMA.
Third parties on the outside can never know precisely what passed between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. But they can know what passed from the Obama/Woods partnership to the forces of corruption in Chicago: BIG MONEY. And we can know the consequences of recorded votes in Illinois and Washington D.C. And therein hangs a tale for the next 28 days.

TODAY'S EMAIL TO THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN:

Last night's debate was stultifying, largely due to Brokaw's heavy hand, but Senator McCain passed on both the passion and the issues that could have made it a clear win.

1) The ECONOMY is OUR ISSUE -- when it comes to analyzing how we got here, Republicans hold ALL the cards. The Senator must pound them, and promise investigation and prosecution of the miscreants.

2) Obama heaps vague praises on the troops. Where were his words of condemnation when troops were compared to Nazis, called too dumb to get a better job, and treated as dupes who been 'betrayed' by General Petraeus? Is it praise to accuse them of killing civilians with air raids?

3) Maybe it's distasteful to go after Obama about his past personal relationships (I disagree), but names should be named in connection with grotesque educational philosophy (Ayers) and grotesque earmarks (Wright and Pfleger)-- two birds with one stone.

4) Sarah Palin can be the most high profile witness for the sanctity of life since John Paul II. Contrast this with Obama's CAREER ADVOCACY of barbaric assaults on the unborn or accidentally born child.

Please, Senator McCain, STAND UP AND FIGHT!

Today.

Tomorrow is too late.

THE HILLS ARE ALIVE,
AND IT'S KIND OF FRIGHTENING....

(skippingly)

How do you solve a problem like Obama?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find the words that mean Obama--
A flibbertygibbet,
A will-o'-the-wisp,
A clown?

Many a thing he thinks he ought to tell you,
Even the things he doesn't understand.
But how does he make you stay,
And cough up your bucks to pay?
He makes it look so easy, and so grand!

Oh, how do you solve a problem like Obama?
How do you hold a moonbat in your hand?


I would like John McCain to win the election on November 4.

I wish it were clear to me that he did too.

I guess that's why they call the newsroom discussion after the debates a "post-mortem."

CLUELESS IN CHICAGO

Barack Obama knew "thousands of people," he tells us.

But increasingly it seems that the people he knew weren't the people he knew.


Jeremiah Wright, racist, is not the Jeremiah Wright he knew.

Tony Rezko, felon, is not the Tony Rezko he knew.

Now, to no one's great surprise, Bill Ayers, terrorist bomber, is not the Bill Ayers he knew.

How soon, as has already been speculated, will Obama claim that his wife Michelle, the angry, thin-skinned, racists-are-under-my-bed whiner, is not the Michelle Obama he knew.

How long before President Obama tells us that Madmood Ahmadinnerjacket, vaporizer of the State of Israel, is not the Madmood he knew?


Did Barry Obama spend his childhood taking candy from strangers, or what?

More to the point, is his childhood over yet?

FOOD FOR THOUGHT:

WHY IT MATTERS THAT BARACK OBAMA GOT A JOB, LAUNCHED A POLITICAL CAREER, AND WORKED SIDE BY SIDE IN THE COMPANY OF ADMITTED TERRORIST WILLIAM AYERS

John Murtaugh tells the story of the night the Weather Underground tried to murder him and his family. He was nine years old at the time:

I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother’s pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside.

Are we always responsible for everyone we happen to attend a party with, or shake hands with, or break bread with? No. But a political fundraiser, the obtaining of a paid board appointment, the creation of a non-profit grant-giving organization from scratch, and the carrying out of its mandate over several years, are activities that foster RELATIONSHIPS, and we are personally responsible for such choices in our lives.

Barack Obama was able to work with an unrepentant domestic terrorist bomber for years, without ever feeling he needed a shower afterwards. Or, who knows?, maybe he did want that shower -- just not enough to risk sidetracking his jet-propelled trajectory to power.

In an interview which appeared in the New York Times on (coincidentally) September 11, 2001, William Ayers stated flatly that he did not regret carrying out bombings and felt he "didn't do enough" in the cause of violent anarchy. Perhaps, given access to better equipment, he'd have favored "air raiding villages and killing civilians" like Obama thinks American soldiers have done in Afghanistan. Maybe he can still apply for a grant, come the new administration.


EDUCATORS SUPPORT THEIR FELLOW-EDUCATOR

A bunch of Chicagoland folks prepared to admit that they're in the same line of work as bill Ayers are soliciting an endorsement of their dear friend and colleague with this rather disturbing statement.

With a flourish of bad grammar and egregious style, the teachers make this dubious assertion about the nature of education as a profession:

All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day.

Hm-m-m. Guess when teachers get busy challenging dogmas and "interrogating and troubling the given and the taken-for-granted" (wha?), that would explain why so durn few kids these days graduate from high school knowing who Alexander Hamilton or Lewis and Clark were. Louisianna Purchase anyone? Spanish-American War? Teapot Dome? Six times eight?

The educators will admit this much: "It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans."

Funny, I don't remember hundreds of thousands of people committing one terrorist bombing per day between September 1969 and May 1970. That was left to those "passionate" specialists in the Weather Underground -- like the one who left Chicago City Attorney Richard Elrod paralyzed in October 1969, during the street riots of the "Days of Rage." Ah-h-h, those were the days, my friend. Read Elrod's story with a sweater on, 'cause it's chilling.

But it all happened SO long ago, when Barry Obama was only 8. However, Barry was over 40 when Bill Ayers spoke to the New York Times in 2001:

So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ''I don't want to discount the possibility,'' he said.

What can I say, America? THINK before you vote.

UPDATE: Oh crap, my aunt signed this statement thing. I only know this because I checked for her name.....

Dear Senator McCain:

Even Saturday Night Live has clicked to the fact that the economic crisis is entirely the Democrats' fault, and that taxpayers have just coughed up $700 billion to cover the crap-outs of non-taxpaying parasites and credit-card addicts.

Watch this video of last Saturday's Bailout spoof sketch, here:




......Oh wait. I watched it at 4:00 this afternoon, but it's now 7:30 and SNL has pulled it.



Guess their friends in the Obamarama camp found it an "inconvenient truth" and it has gone POOF! down the memory hole. Too bad. It was quite illustrative and on point. Obama-Ayres, Obama-Wright, Obama-ACORN, Obama-infanticide, Obama-Daley, Obama-Rezko, Obama-Rashid Khalidi & the PLO, heck even Obama-Michelle! all, POOF! down the memory hole, in pursuit of the coronation of the Almighty O.

You have 30 days to figure this out America.

You have about 30 minutes to figure this out, Senator McCain.

HOUSE PASSES GIANT PIG-TROUGH




...And the President just thanked Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank for their help in reaching consensus.





I AM gonna hurl.

Updated!

SAY IT AIN'T SO, JOE

THERE YOU GO AGAIN!


Breathe.

She did fine. She did better than fine. Even Peggy Noonan said, "She killed."

Ball's in your court, Johnny Mac. Stand up and fight!

Heh.


DEVELOPMENTS IN OBAMAWORLD - I

Gateway Pundit [check out their fantastic post-debate rally coverage -- WOOOH!] reveals that the "Asian Americans for Obama" page on the Obama website advertises "Get out the vote" days taking place, illegally, at a list of mosques around the country during the Eid festival, which concludes this week.


Let's see now... checklist: In America it's now okay to break tax laws at

(1) black churches
(2) mosques
(3) Catholic churches

As they say on Sesame Street, "One of these things does not belong."


DEVELOPMENTS IN OBAMAWORLD - II

WATCH MY HEAD EXPLODE

Yes, my friends, there is a website called "Pro-Life, Pro-Obama" devised by no less than (as I referred to Andrew Sullivan once) formerly conservative now alien life form Douglas Kmiec.


Here's Kmiec's startling bio from the website:

Douglas W. Kmiec holds the endowed chair in Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University. Prior to that, he was dean and St. Thomas More Professor of Law at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He also served as Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He is author of the new book, Can A Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama.

Among Kmiec's musings on his Cirque de Soleil-like moral contortions is this:

I believe we are all called to build a culture of life - but there's more to it than just hoping that the next Supreme Court justice somehow deals with Roe v. Wade. A bad economy is threatening to human life......

Oy-vay Maria.

Adding his voice to this perverse mix is much-conflicted author Frank Schaeffer. One of his commenters, Bill Bannon, puts his bizarre position into perspective.

So…let’s draw a conclusion for future elections past this one… with another form of pain other than abortion…… if a candidate looks good physically and believes firmly in the legalization of water boarding but is a good speaker and a good writer, he will inspire us so much with hopefulness that we will not want water boarding while he fights to keep water boarding legal. So we should elect him while opposing water boarding ourselves because his charism of hopefulness will make us reject waterboarding while he fights to keep it legal. I think I got it now.

Ouch. Cool, Bill.


SAINTS PRAYED TO (AND NEEDING TO BE THANKED) FOR SUCCESS IN THE VEEP DEBATE:










































St. John Chrysostom [of the Golden Mouth], Our Lady of Guadalupe [Patroness of the Americas], Blessed Marie de l'Incarnation [Pioneer Patroness of Women's Education], Ste. Jeanne d'Arc [Medieval Commander and honorary moose hunter], Ste. Anne de Beaupre [Patroness of Mothers], St. Joseph the Worker [Patron of the United States], and, of course,





Sarah,

who laughed.

ASK ALL THE QUESTIONS YOU WANT TONIGHT,
MS. IFILL --

THESE ARE THE ONLY ONES THAT MATTER TODAY

At the turn of the year 2005 to 2006, I ushered in the New Year with this bit o' wisdom from a fella called Sgt. Grit:

Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR.

I then offered a retrospective in which I dubbed 2005:

"THE YEAR OF THE LIE"

Well, hard as it may be to believe, 2008 may surpass its predecessor for the title of:

"YEAR OF THE BIGGEST BATCH OF LIES EVER"

One is always ready to say that the outrage of any particular day is "unprecedented", but there is no fitter word for what we have seen this past year on the part of the news media, upon whom the average Joe has long depended for a picture of the world as it is. The traditional media -- newspapers, the "big three" of network television with a few of their spin-off brethren, the major news magazines -- have never in the history of American politics been so transparently activist for one candidate over another. Barack Obama is their long-awaited perfect candidate, and they will stop at nothing to put him in office.

And he is, in so many frightening ways, the perfect candidate for the present day: physically attractive, photogenic, smooth-talking (with notes), overflowing with vapid verbal fuzzies and pledges so comforting and lofty that their staggering hubris is lost in the mist. Obama is the perfect candidate for an age when a huge proportion of the voting public is either over-"educated" with fallacies and conspiracy theories, and seething with irrational anger over non-existent injustices (like a "stolen" election or "inside job" terrorism) -- or brain-dead from celebrity worship, with an addiction to fake reality TV and mainstreamed soft-porn serials. Both segments of society are fatally vulnerable to hysteria over a well-packaged candidate whose persona is fundamentally an illusion.

This illusion was founded in the "post-racial, post-partisan" mythology of a candidate who has spent his short but calculated political career caressed in the ample bosom of race-baiting agitation and socialist activism, fused (oddly) to an old-fashioned jack-booted money-grubbing Chicago political machine. The few genuine touchstones of his life about whom we know -- father, mother, spiritual and political mentors -- have been papered over by the same media that celebrates the idea, but suppresses the contents, of Obama's two ridiculously premature autobiographies. (Including those parts now shown to be falsified.) The vast unknowns are being dug out of the crevices by various hard-scrabbling journalists, but will remain untouched by the incurious mainstream.

Hard to imagine that the biggest mountain of B.S. yet to appear would make its debut just a month before the election, but so it has. There has been no bigger lie than the attempt by Obama and his party to hang the economic implosion on the Republicans, when the truth is 180 degrees opposite, and the fault is at least 98% the Democrats'. And the indisputable evidence is everywhere -- except on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, and the various self-appointed papers of record.

So 2008 seems poised to be the YEAR OF THE WHOPPIN' BIG LIE, WITH CRIMINAL RESPONSIBILITY.

As I said more than two years ago, the ORCS are winning.

Back when the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy came out, and there was some controversy over the various actors’ reflections on whether or not it was appropriate to draw parallels between the fictitious battles for Middle Earth and the all-too-real battles against Al Qaeda and its sponsors, my sense was that the left-leaning types who rejected the parallels probably assumed that we pro-war crazies saw in those waves of Orcs, sweeping down upon the cornered Good Guys, the faces of Islamist “militants.” Not, in my view, a wholly unjustified interpretation of those scenes.

However, at the time I expressed a somewhat different take on those brilliantly executed scenes of descending hoards, especially the terrifying attack at Helm’s Deep in film II (The Two Towers). What I saw in the deformed bodies and ghoulish monster faces of the Orcs was the physical embodiment of The Lie, and the overwhelming power of an accumulation of Lie upon Lie upon Lie. This was evil incarnate. This was the vision of why Satan is called The Father of Lies.

Here's just a little sampling of this year's most flagrant use of lies, damned lies, and statistics:

Obama collects illegal campaign contributions in the millions.

Obama's friends, supporters, spiritual mentors, and political resume, and his destructive effect on the community he claimed to be helping -- all completely uninteresting to the mainstream press -- form a saga of radical left activism that should make America shudder.

NBC and the New York Times try to trivialize or cast doubt on McCain's history of torture in Vietnam.

Obama thug squads are trying to suppress criticism of his campaign, much in the vein that he has always been most successful not by winning elections so much as choreographing them, by shoving his opponents off a cliff.

And then, of course, the all-out blitzkrieg against Sarah Palin: Top 7 here , more here.




The Orc is the lie. It is swarming over the hillsides and bearing down upon the hapless Middle Earthlings.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit contributes this:

A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS:
"Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into Obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working."

The fix for Obama is in, and it's wORCing.

UN-FREAKIN'-BELIEVABLE

Vice-Presidential Debate "moderator" GWEN IFILL will release her new book The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009. (Notice that there's no cover image on the ad -- she's waiting for the Obama victory photo.)

Ifill has barely concealed her bias over time. But this is too much. Listen to her gush here.

McCain campaign claims not to have known until today.

Shake these people up -- if there's any hope for democracy in America, call or write the McCain people and INSIST that they INSIST that Ifill step down.

http://www.johnmccain.com/Contact/

(703) 418-2008

Lord Save Us.

OBAMA COURTS THE GRADE-SCHOOL KIDS' VOTE

What do you mean, they can't vote? ACORN will fix that.


They'll start with this spontaneous, original, Columbus-Day-type kid-generated pageant, with all its simple, childlike appeal (provided by the CEO of NBC, Jeff Zucker, and a complete professional Hollywood film crew...)




Oddly reminiscent of....



Massive HAT-TIP and thanks to Small Dead Animals

Updated: Even the lefty British Guardian finds the singing Obamabits CREEPY.


This a.m. on Dennis Miller:

"Happy Birthday to former President Jimmy Carter, who turns 84 today, NOW SHUT UP!"

HOW THE CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS DECEIVED AND DEFRAUDED THEIR WAY TO "COUNTRYWIDE" ECONOMIC RUIN

Classics Illustrated version

Coda: Bill Clinton distances himself from himself

BILL CLINTON ENDORSES BARACK OBAMA

SORTA.

NOW WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THIS

Want to keep an eye on your kid in Iraq? Join his unit!


48-year-old retired Marine Jane Strand quit the corps, had six kids, waited for her Marine husband to retire, and then joined the North Carolina National Guard. So did her youngest son, Timothy. Now they're both about to deploy. OOH-RAH.

Drudge brings us the story.



TRYING TO FOLLOW THE CREDIT MESS/ELECTION FROM

Québèc City

Hard to collect too many thoughts when left with mere CNN on the hotel TV, and an hotel internet that moves a little slowly.

Having to remind myself that when Sarah Palin's interview performances are pronounced a failure, this is being done by the same people who think she's sub-human because she didn't go to Princeton. (Loved her answer to Katie Perky about not having had the leisure to back-pack around Europe.)

Is there important stuff she doesn't know? Sure. Can she learn it quickly? Absolutely. She's smart and master of all she surveys -- up until now she's been surveying Alaska. Now she'll move on and survey the wider world, with a big staff of people to do the digesting, and her Bullshit-Meter in full working order.

She'll be fine. Cool it, McCain campaign. Chill. Don't overwhelm her with coaching -- she's starting to come off a bit too self-conscious and trying too hard, just as Bush did (fatally) when made to feel inadequate by his handlers.


Been thinking of Ms. Palin and her position a lot while touring around the city here. One of the most powerful forces to settle here in the 17th century was the order of Ursuline Sisters of Tours, who came to this remote and primitive outpost to establish education for women -- both the local native girls (their primary mission) and the daughters of the European settlers. They proved more successful than did the Jesuits with the native boys.

Nearly four centuries later, in a profoundly secularized
(downright irreligious) Québèc, the Ursulines persevere in their vocation to young women, operating an elementary school with 500 students, located on their original grounds -- to say nothing of the vast apostolate which spread across North America from the arrival of a few intrepid French women on the muddy shores of 17th-century Québèc.

[Dare we propose that, um, they don't make Frenchies like they used to?....]


Monument to education of women, in front of Ursuline Chapel, Québèc City.

ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT Updated

A too-typically lame sketch from Saturday Night Live about allegedly dishonest McCain ads. Nothing to lie awake nights about -- but one does long for some equal-opportunity shot-taking at his messianically mockable rival.

The sketch is too weak to warrant much tooth-grinding amongst Republicans, except for the fact that it was apparently the "inspiration" of former SNL writer/performer, and current Minnesota Democratic Senate candidate Al "Stuart Smalley" Franken, a man known both for his limitations and his mean-spiritedness even before he left the show for the second time in 1995.



And another SNL effort, which is taking mucho heat on the grounds that it was aimed, yet again, at Sarah Palin and her family.

Sorry -- I'm in the camp that says it was instead a total burn on the New York Times and its insulated, snobby, deeply ignorant readership. Like much modern satire, it's so close to the truth it's almost not funny.

The controversial "incest" element was, however, unnecessary and should not have passed network self-censorship. that having been said, it did accurately reflect exactly the kind mindless bigoted filter through which the urban chattering classes see the heartland people about whom they understand absolutely nothing. Pulled by NBC -- an attack of decency? Who Knew!

IN OTHER ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

The lowest-rated Emmy award broadcast in history was the occasion of celebrity idiocy on a grand scale. I only watched it while channel-hopping, so I wasn't aware of the full depths of horror purveyed by the five-person reality-tv hosting team, but I gather they SUCKED hugely.

What I did see was Laura Linney -- a beautiful woman wearing one of the ugliest and most ill-fitting dresses I've ever seen an award-winner in who was dressing to be taken fashion-seriously [meow]-- accepting her award for the privilege of playing the towering Abigail Adams. In so doing, she delivered her well-rehearsed innocuous-sounding lead-in to the deranged punch-line that the Founding Fathers of the United States were "community organizers."

P-U-U-H-H-L-E-E-E-Z-E.

As someone famous (me) once said, Try this on, Laura: the Founding Fathers "organized" their "community" under one condition certainly NOT shared by metrosexual Harvard boys lately from Chicago: the threat of being captured during the revolution they fomented, and being HUNG for treason. Every one of them risked their lives, whether or not they were ever in an army or militia.

Then we had the spectacle of brain-fried old hippie Tommy Smothers further tarnishing our happy memories of his once-comic persona by babbling anti-war gibberish with spasmodic howls of victimology, as he accepted a fantasy award allegedly delayed by forty years or so, from back when the Brothers' show was cancelled because they skated too near the edges of blasphemy (courtesy of David Steinberg) as much as political tub-thumping.

Oh, Tommy, boo-hoo.
Why didn't you find something else to do?

CANADIAN POLITICAL MIND-BOGGLE

Just saw shreikin' Sheila Copps on Steve Paikin's Agenda, defending the Sarah Palin choice and speaking quite calmly and sensibly, about sexism in electoral politics and about the prospect of La Palin being elected. Carumba. I believe pigs may fly.


THIS TOO

Former British PM Tony Blair put his swell suit in the chair at Jon Stewart's Daily Show tonight. I couldn't watch more than about 30 seconds. I'm sorry. There are some things for which Stewart's excessive glibitude is just too lightweight -- stupid questions about how he (Tony) and Bush decided to go to war. Blair replied that this was a serious decision, not made lightly.

People are dead -- history has been changed forever. Get with it, Stewart. Not the time to sacrifice all other considerations to your need to be cute and clever.