The Ineligible Appointing the Ineligible

Despite mounting concern over his own eligibility to assume the United States Presidency, former Senator Barack H. Obama (D-IL) is expected to nominate an ineligible person to be Secretary of State.

Obama, who has yet to provide legal proof of native birth, resigned from the Senate in November amid questions and lawsuits charging that he lacks the necessary qualifications to become President. Compounding his troubles was the Constitutional requirement that he could not hold both Executive and Legislative office at the same time.

But experts say that the same Constitutional Section (Article I, Section 6) requiring him to step down also precludes the appointment of a sitting Senator to a Cabinet post during the Senate term in which the post has had its pay increased. If as expected he nominates Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), she would be unable to serve.

However others say that the Constitution may not be binding on the Obama Administration.

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Hillary Clinton is Not Eligible To Be Secretary of State

And it's not even really a debatable point.

Article I, § 6.2 of the United States Constitution:

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.

"Emoluments" is deadwhiteguyese for "pay". The point being to keep Congresscritters from creating cushy jobs in the bureaucracy and having themselves appointed thereto.

President Bush, in keeping with the cost of living increases lavished for no particular reason on government officials, raised the emoluments of the Secretary of State in January, 2008, which is during the current Senate term of Hillary Clinton.

The good and wise Professor Volokh (w/t) thinks that it would be enough to lower the pay for the secretarial job back to January, 2007 levels.

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Hilllary Abandons Senate for Secretarial Position

Hillary Rodham Clinton, former star in the Democratic Party, is leaving the Senate after what some say is little accomplished except a failed attempt to capture her Party's nomination for President. Clinton will accept a job as Secretary in the administration of the very candidate that Party bosses selected over her.

The move gives Ms. Rodham Clinton a chance to gain executive experience. Previously, political opponents pointed to her lack of executive experience.

Saddled with campaign debt, Clinton is leaving the Congress to join the Executive Branch. Clinton accepted millions in loans from her New York-based charitable foundation to finance her White House bid. While foreign citizens are forbidden to make campaign donations to Presidential candidates, donations to her charitable foundation can come from anywhere.

Clinton won't be forced to work on a day-to-day basis in the White House, which she occupied in her youth with her husband Bill Clinton, but in the State Department. As an older woman, she no longer has children at home, and so is free to travel.

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Socialist Democrats Feud With Marxist Democrats Over Power

News outlets are reporting a vicious fight in the wake of Democrats seizing power over Republicans in the recent US elections. The socialist wing of the party, led by the aging Steny Hoyer (D-MD), vows to defeat the marxist faction led by former homosexual pimp Barney Frank (D-MA) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in order to keep the radicals from destroying the nation too quickly.

Hoyer, remaining alert at the twilight of his career, still boasted of his hold on the majority of newly elected Congressmen. Voters are more interested in implementing the ideas of Karl Marx in a practical way than in finding enlightenment through ideological purity, Hoyer noted. "The 33 new Members of Congress coming to Washington to swell our side of the aisle are pragmatic, not dogmatic."

It is not yet clear if Hoyer retains the ability or the will to stand up to Pelosi and powerful incoming Executive branch official Barack Obama (D-IL). During the campaign, Pelosi and Hoyer squabbled over the role superdelegates should play in selecting the Democrat nominee for Obama's position. The Hoyer camp eventually won out. As Hoyer urged, the superdelegates disregarded the popular vote to select Obama over defeated socialist wing candidate Hillary Clinton (D-NY).

Speaker Pelosi argued during the campaign that after being vital to his selection for office, she and her marxists would be more bipartisan and ally with the more conservative socialist wing in support of Obama.

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Why Ayers Matters

Now that I no longer care who wins the upcoming presidential election between John McCain and Barack Obama, there are only a few reasons for me to blog on it.

One of those reasons is bad logic.

There are many who will see the McCain campaign highlighting the Obama-Ayers connection as mere guilt-by-association. We know that, logically speaking, associating with evil doesn't make one evil. Even if Ayers were evil, merely associating with him doesn't in and of itself make Barack Obama evil.

However, there is much more to the relationship than that. The two have known each other for years, perhaps since Obama was an undergraduate student. Ayers hired Obama to distribute between $50 and $150 million for selling anti-capitalism in the Chicago public schools. You don't hire someone to give away that kind of money unless the two of you are in sync and believe in the same goals. There is clear evidence that Obama and Ayers are cut of the same political cloth.

But when Hillary Clinton brought the subject up at a debate during the Democratic primaries, Obama said that Ayers was "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood." He lied about the relationship.

But here's the thing: Ayers was a terrorist as a young man, setting bombs in the Pentagon, at police stations, and in the home of a judge in the attempt to influence a trial. He has never repented of these actions, saying he wishes he'd done more. Obama should not have worked for him, but he did. And now he wants out of that decision.

So he says that Ayers was fire-bombing judges' homes with their children asleep in bed while he, Obama, was only eight years old, so it doesn't matter.

It's an exercise in non sequitur. The issue is not how old Obama was when Ayers did his evil; the issue is that Obama shares this guy's views and helped him spend money to promote those views. And then he lied about it.

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The Nation in Resurgence

It seems that geography is making a comeback in its battle with ideology.

In Iraq, tribal forces have risen up to reclaim control of their territory from the transnational terrorists. Now, via Ace, they would like to show their Afghan counterparts how to do the same.

They would also like to supplant the sectarian Sunni vs Shiite electoral map in Iraq with one based on tribal association.

Some might question the philosophical underpinnings of such a shift, being a move away from using differences in abstract beliefs for political grouping and toward using ancestry. But religious beliefs will still play a big part in Iraqi politics, just inside the tribal system. Arab culture places a high value on paternal authority, and failing to include the tribal organization in the political structure of the country creates at best a dual power structure, and at worst invalidates the democratic one.

In the United States, the Democratic Party primary saw both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama use protectionism in an attempt to curry favor with the voters. But what they are really tapping in to is not some economic theory of harm in selling our products overseas. The source of protectionism's appeal is the fear of globalism, that we will be at the mercy of foreign powers, especially foreign corporate and banking interests.

The world over, it seems the pendulum is swinging away from the imagined, and back to the real. I doubt it will swing very far.

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I Have A Dream Ticket

There is an alluring desire to support Barack Obama because of the color of his skin. Those of us raised in the South in the 60's and 70's remember the rapid change from casual, tacit acknowledgment that blacks were second-class citizens who ought to drink at other fountains and sleep in other hotels, to our national shame at realizing that our ideal of equality for all had been a sham.

When two candidates are equally qualified and able to carry out the duties of some position, Affirmative Action says we should choose the one from the most oppressed (or our least represented) group. The unspoken premise is that people must be seen as members of a group, and not merely as individuals. According to those who favor Affirmative Action, we must atone for the mistreatment of some people in the past by advancing the circumstances of others who happen to look like those we've mistreated.

Similarly, Barack Obama repeatedly makes the same argument. In order to heal the racial divisions among us, we must support him for President. Only by electing a black person may this healing take place. The Democratic Party has chosen him for this, despite fewer Democrats actually voting for him than voted for his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton.

That this argument is the exact antithesis of the desire expressed by Martin Luther King Jr should have need explanation. But apparently it does. For Dr. King said he had a Dream.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

So how can we claim to fulfill the Dream by choosing the candidate based on the color of his skin?

Perhaps it is not so. Perhaps he was chosen based on the minuscule differences between the candidates. Yet once his affiliations and the content of his character became widely known, the primary vote totals broke down on pure demographic lines.

And this was not because people became more racist; rather, the character of the candidate became more widely known. And as it was known, it was disliked.

Now to heal the Party it appears that Hillary Clinton will be sought for Obama's running mate. The symbolism of a white woman playing second fiddle to a black man will be infuriating to feminists; Obama supporters will be unhappy at not being rid of the Clintons, especially after Hillary's mention of Robert Kennedy's assassination.

And Republicans, with their party in tatters, should rejoice. Because the combined negatives of these two on the same ticket is indeed like a dream come true -- for John McCain.
[Minor editing]

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The Fowl Return, Make Nest

Afters years of preaching a certain kind of "fairness", the Democratic Party faithful have seen the results. Barack Obama, whose name was not on the ballot in Michigan, was awarded 46% of that State's delegates to the Democratic National Convention, by the convention's Rules and Bylaws Committee. The committee decided that the results of the Florida election should stand, but that the delegates for each State would get half a vote at the national convention.

It was almost justice. It was almost the right decision. But in attempting to achieve fairness, the committee forgot to be fair to the voters. They also acceded to the threats of violence by Obama supporters should the Party "steal" the election from him.

At the root of the problem is the Fallacy of the Golden Mean: if two people disagree, then the truth is somewhere between what each says. But that is clearly not always the case; sometimes people are just wrong.

Fairness, likewise, has come to mean the absence of unpleasant consequences. But justice demands that we receive the consequences of our actions.

The Democratic Party has a means for making the difficult decision over which of their candidates should be their nominee. It's the nominating convention. The process leading up to the convention is not supposed to be manipulated, though no one with an ounce of sense would suppose it not to be manipulated. On Saturday we saw just such manipulation.

Rather than allowing the Florida and Michigan results to stand as the voters cast their ballots, the committee shifted votes around in an attempt to achieve consensus ahead of the convention and avoid violence in the streets. Hillary supporters were deemed less prone to tantrum, it seems.

It is doubtful that the shifting reflects the will of the voters in Michigan and Florida. But it should never have been done at all.

Because the primary process is supposed to win delegates for each candidate, who then go to the convention pledged to that candidate. Candidates are free to drop out and pledge their delegates to another, but those pledges are not binding on the delegates at the convention. After the first round, none of the pledged delegates are bound to the candidates at all, in fact. In subsequent rounds, all of the backroom deals and politicking can be made and delegate votes cast in full accordance with both rules and fairness. Eventually, consensus develops.

But by shifting delegates from one candidate to another, and from "uncommitted" to the front runner, the Democratic party has shown itself to be undemocratic, unjust, unfair, and unable to perform the most basic duty to which it is assigned: picking a nominee.

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Is Obama Trying to Steal the Nomination?

I'm sure no on on the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Convention will read this, but it's been on my mind lately.

I don't see why there is a problem with Florida or Michigan.

Either don't count them, hold another primary, or count them as they are, exactly, without trying to guess what would have happened if Obama's name were on the ballot.

Because once you start asking what the voters would have done if such and such hypothetical event were the case, there is no end to the questions that inexorably arise. If the candidates were on the ballots, there would have been more campaigning in Florida and Michigan. How would that have affected the result? Since even messianic candidates can't be in two places at once, there would then have been less time in the other States. But which other States? Given the amount of strategizing that goes into campaign resource allocation, it's not clear at all that resources would have come from the other States equally.

In fact, the question is wholly dependent on when the primaries would have taken place. With Florida and Michigan coming up, would candidate Obama have spent as much effort on tiny Iowa or New Hampshire?

And with the results of Florida and Michigan in hand, the candidates almost certainly would have approached the rest of the primary season differently, in terms of fundraising, advertising, and campaign emphasis.

And what if the States had not moved their primaries forward to January, but had moved them to February, or simply had left them as they were? When you start retroactively guessing what would have happened, there's no convenient stopping place.

Divvying up the delegates without regard to how the voters in Florida and Michigan actually voted is a grave injustice. Granted, it fits with the Democratic Party's practice of the use of superdelegates to ignore the will of the rank and file, but it's just not right.

Barack Obama didn't put his name on the ballot in Michigan, and took it off the ballot in Florida. He didn't have to do that. It was a political calculation with the intent of allying himself with Howard Dean, and against the people of Michigan and Florida. For him to now demand the support of those people is hypocrisy. He didn't want their votes before, but they're good enough for him now.

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Megagaff

I've been highly entertained by the Democratic primary over the past several months. Not caring a whit about political correctness, I've found the charges of racism and sexism to be great fun. But Hillary crossed a line.

She may not have meant to cross it, but cross it she did. It's a line we all have been aware of, even alluded to by Michelle Obama in her gas station quote. And I've been dreading what would happen if some (especially right-wing) kook crossed the line. I never imagined that the allegedly astute Hillary Clinton would give this as a reason not to drop out:

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it,"

It's OK to talk about the significance of assassination, and assassination attempts, as they relate to American history. As Memorial Day approaches we do well to remember Lincoln, the Kennedys, King, and others.

I know it's a little late to be warned about this, Senator Clinton, but you don't mention assassination in a hypothetical context. Not on a blog. Not in the newspaper. Not being interviewed on television. And certainly not when you're a candidate for office.

As a TPM blogger puts it:

Ted Kennedy is fighting for his life and she has the lack of judgment to invoke RFK's assasination to make a political point-- a point which also injects the idea of killing a presidential nominee. Do not even attempt to spin this for me. It's not gonna work.

This is a melt down. Things are out of control at her campaign. I think with this remark, she's taken herself out of contention for VP. Not just because I'm angry, but because she's too out of control to ever be President.

And having done so, you don't then try to put yourself in a position that would be benefit from an assassination.

I don't know if this dooms Hillary's campaign or her chances to be Obama's running mate, but it certainly doesn't help. It's hard to think of anything she could have said that would have been more divisive.

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Hillary the Independent

With all the radicalization on the left, and moderation on the right, there is plenty of room for a third party.

Hillary would have to swing to the right quite a bit and run as the girl from Winnetka.

She could say, "You know I've always wanted health care for everyone, and now the country wants that, too. But I'm not a moonbat or a troofer. And I voted to go into Iraq, but that job is finished, and we've won! We can bring our troops home and go on fighting terrorists elsewhere in the world."

Hillary would have to choose a man who would be, or appear to be, strong on national defense.

She would have to do some focus group work on the economy, to position herself as being pro-SMALL business. One thing small business people worry about is providing health insurance to themselves and their workers. Hillary could make the argument that the government should do that. On taxes, she could say that she's for what works.

There are a lot of people (not me) who would vote for her. I think a lot of moderately conservative women would like to see a woman president, if she didn't come with all the Demoonibrat baggage.

Veep? Rudy, or Colin Powell.

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The Race Martyr

The strategy is this: vote Obama, or you are a racist. A key element of that strategy is to focus on the voters, and not the candidate. That is why we will hear, for the next six months, that white rural voters are incurably racist and will not vote for Obama because he is black. But that's the wrong lesson to learn.

Obama's support comes primarily from two groups: academics including college students, and blacks. But it must be noted that it is the liberal academics and liberal blacks who are voting for Obama. He is the most liberal Senator, which this year makes him the most liberal presidential candidate. Academics and blacks lean heavily to the left, hence their support for Obama.

So even though there are few blacks and academics in West Virginia, why was Barack Obama campaigning in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on the day of the West Virginia primary? The Democratic Party uses a proportional delegate system in most of the States including West Virginia, so that one delegate is as good as another. In the overall delegate count, adding a delegate in WV is the same as adding one in Oregon.

Obama may believe he has the nomination all wrapped up, and that no campaigning is necessary in the remaining primary States and territories. He may not think he needs delegates any more, but only electoral votes, of which West Virginia possesses only a few.

But why leave West Virginia entirely? Either his campaign staff messed up again and scheduled the Cape Girardeau meeting on the wrong day, or he wanted to signal that he was giving up in West Virginia. He didn't really try his hardest, so a 72/28 loss is not so bad.

Which leads us to this Washington Post story in which uncorroborated anecdotes of racism are spun as indicating a racially hostile environment for the Obama campaign. Yet anyone who has gone door-to-door for anything knows that people will slam the door in your face, even if you're giving out rose-scented wads of cold cash. As Bill Dupray at The Patriot Room noted in the Redstate comment on the Post story:

When they print this trash, which is racism against white people, they essentially drag race to the forefront and make folks defend themselves against the unfounded scurrilous charge. It takes the focus of the election off Obama's policies and places it on the voters who want to vote against him. It is not about the voters. It is about the candidates.

But by leaving West Virginia, and sacrificing its few delegates (which he was going to have difficulty winning anyway), Obama and his surrogates in the popular press can spend the next six months pointing to racist whites, implicitly or explicitly asking Americans if they want to be racist like that, or be good non-racists and vote for Obama.

So are white rural voters all racists, and is that the reason they don't vote for Obama? Actually, I think the story ought to be that rural voters are less liberal than urban ones, and while it would be nice enough to have a black president, Obama being black is not enough for rural white voters to choose him. They demand sensible, mainsteam policies, which Obama doesn't provide.

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Obama to Drop Out?

An Iowahawk guest columnist has some advice for Senator Obama.

Nice career you've got there, Barack. Wouldn't want anything to 'appen to it, now would we?

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The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

John McCain's mane has turned white, but he remains the lion who refused premature release from a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp, at unspeakable personal hardship, to prevent a public relations coup for his captors.


Hillary Clinton speaks of supporting the Democratic nominee in the fall, but is doing everything she can to see what negative emotions for Obama she can evince, fostering a hostile environment in the Dem ranks (or at least, the nutroots).

Barack Obama? He's just voting "Present!", a void with a nice wardrobe.

Just saying.

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Democracy Demands That Hillary Stays In The Race

To hear Obama supporters and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) talk, Hillary must drop out for the good of the Party, and for the good of the country. If Hillary stays in, John McCain could win and that would be ... bad.

But neither Hillary nor Barack Obama can realistically achieve a majority of pledged delegates unless the other one drops out of the race. The mathematics of that have not changed in several weeks.

Those urging Hillary to concede the nomination to Obama are essentially saying that if one candidate takes a lead, the others should all drop out. They have an understanding of consensus that is different from mine.

The primary system is designed to take into account the wishes of the members of each party, who then go to their respective conventions and hash it all out. There is nothing wrong with not having a nominee going to the convention. Those wanting Hillary to drop out now are afraid that the Party is incapable of doing that hashing without resort to the sort of riots and discord that accompanied the convention of 1968 in Chicago.

No, now they want popular opinion as given by the media and pundits to select the nominee, rather than doing it at the convention. Is the Democratic Party so weak and fractious that it must rely on Tim Russert and Keith Olbermann to make its decisions?

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Hillary Would Retaliate Against Iran [Updated]

[Update, 5 May 08 1541: Apparently, the site to which I linked as a "pacifist dhimmi" objects to the label. Consider it retracted, because I really don't have any investment in the charge. However, it appears that while I was distracted I have become a "pro-Clinton site" and the seminal case of "Clinton Losing Anger Syndrome". Regular readers may find that somewhat humorous. Readers who are irregular should read the caramely goodness that is my written voice more frequently, because they would learn of my disapproval of all of the candidates this year, and as regular readers they wouldn't be so prone to be pacifist dhimmis.][typos fixed, too.]
So the pacifist dhimmis and Iranians are up in arms over Hillary Clinton's assertion that she would unleash the nuclear dogs of war on Iran if they first launched a nuclear strike against Israel.

If Iran's nuclear program is only for peaceful uses, then they will never have a nuclear bomb. If they never have a nuclear bomb, they will never use one against Israel or anyone else.

Nuclear bombs are very difficult to fake.

So is the willingness to defend an ally. Hillary shows it. Obama does not.

Easy solution to Iran's problem: don't launch a nuclear strike against Israel. If you do, you won't be around to regret it.

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Bat Whistles and Night Vision Beer Goggles

Setting aside for the briefest moment the Jeremiah Wright media circus, we turn our attention briefly to another entertaining sideshow in the spectacle that is the Democratic Party Primary Race of Anno Domini 2008. That is the pitched battle between the Feminist American and the African American factions in the Party, said battle being over the right to pose with the greatest moral outrage over political incorrectness.

To catch up: back on March 14, Amanda Marcotte posted that her new book was for sale. The book, It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, features Sheena of the Jungle on the cover and in the book's artwork.

Someone eventually noticed that peppering the drawings in the book were Aftrican warriors, symbolizing the evil male influences that the heroic feminista must battle as she meanders her way through the workaday world. Of course, these depictions were decried as racist.

Ace picks up the story after the epic battle has already produced several double-hulled tankers full of guilt.

Amanda Marcotte's All-White Country Club Publishing House: as silly as I think this is -- I certainly don't think the dumb comic-book pictures are intended to be racist, or can even be viewed as racist without really, really, really wanting to find "unconscious racism" wherever one fixes one's gaze -- it's quite obvious the goofball left takes this nonsense seriously.

So Amanda, and her publisher, and the publisher's pastor, and someone the publisher knew in junior college, all were required to apologize, show fealty to the Dream, say three Hail Gaias. And now once more, with feeling.

Up to speed?

Now Maximos asks us to compare and contrast Marcotte's little pickle over comics with some evangelical anti-Catholic tracts from Jack Chick. And no, I have no double entendre with "little pickle" -- sometimes a pickle is just a pickle. And I really don't think Jack Chick chose his surname to contrast with Amanda Marcotte's use of hot jungle women as feminist icons.

Which brings us, finally, to the point.

The moonbats on the left are highly adapted at picking up the slightest sound and interpreting it as an intentional, malicious, deeply offensive stake pointed directly at the heart of their most holy movement. Any mention of skin color, or even any image of a person of color, will be interpreted as the malevolent prelude to a lynching. Any female figure shown cooking, or cleaning, or cast in some other traditionally female role, will give rise to objectification and gender subjugation.

But by being so hightly attuned, they are forced to focus on just the tiniest of chirps to the exclusion of the rest. Like the sound of birds calling along the shore below the thundering Niagara Falls, to most of us these unintended slights are covered over by what the person speaking or writing actually intended to say. Focusing on the chirps doesn't allow the use of their other senses; feminists are so focused on winning the battle of the sexes that they fail to see themselves belittling others for their skin color.

And in having their ears attenuated so closely to pick up the slightest twirp, the false positives begin to bore the rest of us to tears.

Or as in this case, the tears are of laughter. Because all of this is so ... so ... dramatic. It's group narcissism, the reveling in the belief that one's own opinion and situation is paramount. That it really is all about you.

This election season is, without a doubt, the most fun I've ever had watching politics. I just hope no one gets hurt. Much.

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Move Over, Chuck Norris

There's a new demigod in town:

Barack Obama is so manly that he once got a haircut and passed on the talcum powder.

Barack Obama once scuffed his shoe and walked around with it like that all day -- on purpose.

Barack Obama once bowled his age.

Barack Obama is in his wife's Five.

Barack Obama once bit the head off a Tootsie Roll almost all at once.

Very Barry, puddin' n' pie, kissed a girl and made himself cry.

Barack Obama doesn't take money from lobbyists -- he hires them.

Barack Obama is so patriotic that he votes in almost every Senate session.

Barack Obama can file his own fingernails.

The American Flag is so patriotic it doesn't have to wear an Obama lapel pin.

Barack Obama is so centrist that he is friendly with people who believe the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Barack Obama is happy that the Red Sox beat the curse and won the Super Bowl.

Barack Obama is so bipartisan that he may give Cabinet spots to Hillary supporters.

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Frank J points out that Markos Moulitzas of DailyKos is trying to spin the Obama thumping at the hands of Democratic voters in Pennsylvania as a plus, because it showed the messianic candidate can spend a lot of money and still lose. There's plenty more where that came from, says Kos, so there's no need to spend it wisely or show any gain from its use. Sort of screams Democrat, doesn't it?

I suppose it pleases Kos no end to believe that democracy is all about who can raise the most money from billionairheads, and who can threaten civil war unless their candidate gets in. "Civil war" we must assume to be metaphorical for intra-party conflict, of course.

As most people reading this know, the Democratic Party's system for selecting their candidate for President involves holding primaries or caucuses (and sometimes both) in each state and territory, plus a bunch of "superdelegates" from each State. These are State officials, Congressmen, big contributors to the Party, and Party apparatchik. They vote separately, and independently of, the primary or caucus vote. This is is by design, to A) give the Party brass a big party every four years and B) allow the Party brass to retain control over who they select as nominee.

The superdelegates are going to have a hard time ignoring Obama's war chest (and the spoiled obabies threatening to riot if he is denied his rightful throne) when deciding who to support. I don't see how they can vote for Hillary, unless she raises a bucket load before the convention and reveals that she has a death ray to counter the threats of civil unrest.

Kos also doesn't seem to realize that the more people hear about Barack Obama, the less likely they are to vote for him. So Obama's best strategy may be to buy up TV time and broadcast test patterns.

This election is already so much fun, I almost don't care who actually wins any more.

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Hillary and Barack Keep Digging

I didn't watch the Clinton/Obama debate last night on ABC. I didn't want to put myself through two hours of tee-ball questions about things that don't matter to me, like who can promise to support the troops with the best form of socialized medicine.

Luckily for me and for you, good reader, others were kind enough to watch and even give a running commentary.

Josh at the Talking Points Memo was unhappy with it:

What I didn't like about the debate, though, was the debate itself. Not only were most of the questions on partisan gotchas and frivolous points. But more importantly the questions upon which the candidates were pressed the most were ones that presumed the correctness of Republican agenda items, sometimes explicitly so -- on taxes, capital gains taxes, gun rights, Iraq, etc.

Josh, that's because those are the questions which are most difficult for the candidates to answer, and most likely to take them off autopilot.

Redstate commenters saw the debate as a window into the character of the two Democrats running for President.

I hope Hillary Clinton stays in the race until the Democratic Party convention in Denver. Though not all of the facts that have come to light about Obama are due to her digging, it's clear that when she puts him in a hole, Obama doesn't know that he can't dig his way out.

When asked about his relationship with former Weather Underground domestic terrorist William Ayers:

Obama after complaining about "manufactured issues," says, "this is what I'm talking about... He lives in my neighborhood, he's a professor of English. Not someone I've accepted endorsement of, it's not someone I exchange ideas with on a regular basis... (!) He did detestable acts when I was eight years old."

I'm also friendly with Tom Coburn, a man who has suggested the death penalty may be appropriate for those who perform abortions.

He's not accepted Ayers' endorsement for President, but he most certainly got down on his hands and knees and accepted it in order to gain entree into Chicago politics.

And what does, "on a regular basis" mean? Obama and Ayers serve on a board together. It seems likely that Obama doesn't regularly attend the board meetings, so perhaps they only get a chance to exchange ideas when he does attend.

But the final quoted sentence above may be a glimmer of Equivalency shining through the Wright- and Harvard-induced fog. Coburn believes children have the same human rights to 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" a minute before birth as they do a minute after. Abortion he therefore considers to be murder, an appropriate punishment for which is the death penalty. But Coburn isn't bombing abortion clinics. In fact, no one has done that for over ten years, and Coburn never has.

But Obama, steeped in the liberal doctrine of means justified by goals, equates Coburn's work within the system with Ayers' attempts to destroy it.

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