Cry me a fraking river

CINCINNATI – An Ohio agency director resigned Wednesday in the wake of a finding that she improperly used state computers to access personal information on the man who became known as "Joe the Plumber" during the presidential campaign.

Two other officials who were suspended from their positions for their role in the computer search will not be returning to their jobs, an agency spokeswoman said.

Department of Job and Family Services Director Helen Jones-Kelley said in a statement accompanying her resignation that she won't allow her reputation to be disparaged and that she is concerned for her family's safety.

This woman abused her authority in allowing a fishing expedition through the private information of a private citizen because he dared to stand up and ask a real question of a political candidate.

This is an actual crime and she ought to do some time in the Ohio state womens' prison but she will escape justice and is being allowed to frame her departure in disgrace as though she were reluctantly being forced to leave in order to protect her family from the death threats of the evil right-wing hit machine.

Ever notice how when members of the Party of Grotesque Corruption get caught they always start crying like sniveling little girls about the death threats they supposedly get? What's next, will she claim to find a noose tied to her doorknob?

I'll say it again. This woman should be sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial. The fact that she is not is a perversion of justice and she should just shut up and be glad that she's not going to spend the next few years showering in groups.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

It's bad enough that the Republican Party can't prevent Democrats from voting in its primaries and saddling us with The New York Times' favorite Republican as our presidential nominee. If the Republican Party can't protect an election won by the incumbent U.S. senator in Minnesota, there is no point in donating to the Republican Party.

The day after the November election, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman had won his re-election to the U.S. Senate, beating challenger Al Franken by 725 votes.

Then one heavily Democratic town miraculously discovered 100 missing ballots. And, in another marvel, they were all for Al Franken! It was like a completely evil version of a Christmas miracle.

As strange as it was that all 100 post-election, "discovered" ballots would be for one candidate, it was even stranger that the official time stamp for the miracle ballots printed out by the voting machine on the miracle ballots showed that the votes had been cast on Nov. 2 -- two days before the election.

Democratic election officials in the miracle-ballot county simply announced that their voting machine must have been broken. Don't worry about it -- they were sure those 100 votes for Franken were legit.

Then another 400-odd statistically improbable "corrections" were made in other Democratic strongholds until -- by the end of election week -- Coleman's lead had been whittled down to a mere 215 votes.

Since then, highly irregular counting methods have added to Franken's total bit by bit, to the point that Coleman is now ahead by only 188 votes.

As long as Coleman maintains any lead at all, Republicans don't seem to care that Coleman's advantage is being shrunk by laughable ballot "discoveries" and disreputable standard-switching from precinct to precinct -- depending on which method of counting ballots is most advantageous to Franken.

Consider a few other chilling examples of Democrats thieving their way to victory over the years.

In 1974, Republican Louis Wyman won his race for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, beating Democrat John Durkin by 355 votes. Durkin demanded a recount -- which went back and forth by a handful of votes until the state's Ballot Law Commission concluded that Wyman had indeed won by (at least) two votes.

Wyman was certified the winner by the New Hampshire secretary of state and was on his way to Washington when ... the overwhelmingly Democratic U.S. Senate refused to seat Wyman.

Despite New Hampshire's certification of Wyman as the winner of the election, this was the post-Watergate Senate, when Democrats could get away with anything -- up to and including a prank known as "President Jimmy Carter."

The U.S. Senate spent months examining disputed ballots from the New Hampshire election. Unable to come up with a method to declare the Democrat the winner that didn't require a guillotine, the Senate forced New Hampshire to hold another election.

It was a breathtaking abuse of power. New Hampshire had certified a winner of its Senate election, but it was a Republican, so the Democratic Senate simply ordered a new election.

Demoralized Republicans stayed away from the race and, this time, the Democrat won the re-vote.

Even more egregious was the Indiana House race in 1984. On election night, the incumbent Democrat Frank McCloskey appeared to have won a narrow victory of 72 votes. But after a correction was made in one county, it turned out his Republican opponent, Richard McIntyre, had won by 34 votes.

McIntyre was certified the winner -- which is when the trouble usually starts for a Republican.

Again, a majority Democrat House refused to seat the certified winner in a close election. I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the winner was a Republican.

Consequently, Indiana performed yet another recount of the entire district, which again showed that Republican McIntyre was the winner -- this time by 418 votes. Now he was really asking for it. The nerve of this guy! Hey, buddy, do you mind? We're trying to throw an election over here!

As The Washington Post reported at the time: There were "no allegations of fraud" in the recount and 90 percent of ballot disqualifications had been agreed to "by election commissions dominated by Democrats."

So naturally the House refused to seat the Republican even though he had received the most votes (hereinafter referred to as "the winner"). The House proceeded to conduct its own recount. (If you haven't detected a pattern by this point, please ask your doctor if Prilosec is right for you.)

This time, instead of ordering the district to hold another election, the Democratic House saved all concerned a lot of time and money by simply declaring Democrat Frank McCloskey the winner by four votes.

The vote-theft most like Minnesota this year was the infamous 2004 gubernatorial election in Washington State. The Republican won the race on election night, but ballots favoring the Democrat kept being "discovered" until the Democrat finally eked out a majority. At that point, the recount was immediately halted and the Democrat declared the victor.

You would have to go back to Reconstruction to find an election that was stolen by the Republicans this way, but it's all in a day's work for the Democrats.

That's why they were so testy about the 2000 Florida election. It was the one time in the last century Republicans wouldn't let Democrats steal an election they lost by less than a thousand votes.

No matter how many times Democrats steal elections, Republicans keep thinking the next time will be different. Minnesota is famously clean, isn't it? It must be different. It's not different. It's still the Democrats.

I'm glad that Miss Ann is keeping an eye on events in Minnesota for us. The Democrats keep stealing a few votes at a time from Mr. Coleman in the hopes that we'll get so tired of the whole thing that we'll just fall asleep and when we wake up the failed comedian, actor, talk show host Al Franken will be a United States Senator.

I have known for some time that Franken was a scumbag leftist but I never realized until now just how low he would go.

I guess that Joe Lieberman was the last person with any integrity whatsoever left in the Democrat party.

They ought to just declare the whole thing an ongoing criminal enterprise under RICO and send the whole lot of them to federal prison.

But then we'd have to feed them, clothe them and give them at least rudimentary medical care.

Anybody know where we can get a lot of Zyclon-B cheap?

The RINO's continue to spin

(CNN) — The Republican party must stop "shouting at the world" and start listening to minority groups if it is to win elections in the 21st century, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday.

In an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria for Sunday's "GPS" program, President Bush's former secretary of state said his party's attempt "to use polarization for political advantage" backfired last month.

"I think the party has to take a hard look at itself," Powell said in the interview, which was taped Wednesday. "There is nothing wrong with being conservative. There is nothing wrong with having socially conservative views — I don't object to that. But if the party wants to have a future in this country, it has to face some realities. In another 20 years, the majority in this country will be the minority."

Powell, who crossed party lines and endorsed President-elect Barack Obama just weeks before the election, said the GOP must see what is in the "hearts and minds" of African-American, Hispanic and Asian voters "and not just try to influence them by… the principles and dogma."

"I think the party has to stop shouting at the world and at the country,"Powell said. "I think that the party has to take a hard look at itself, and I've talked to a number of leaders in recent weeks and they understand that." Powell, who says he still considers himself a Republican, said his party should also stop listening to conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

"Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh?" Powell asked. "Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts?"

Zakaria's full interview with Powell will air Sunday at 1 p.m. ET on CNN.

Mr. Powell what Republican better embodied your brand of moderate non-confrontational "reach-across-the-aisle Republicanism" than John McCain?

The fact is that RINO's like you got exactly the candidate that you wanted in McCain. John McCain was the "only Republican candidate who could win", at least that is what you spent the last four years telling anyone who would listen.

Well we all saw how that worked out didn't we?

The only reason that McCain's four point loss wasn't a 14 point loss was the presence of genuine conservative Sarah Palin on the ticket.

Mr. Powell are you and your fellow RINO's so stupid, so blind, so caught up in your delusions that you can't open your eyes and see simple reality. We tried it your way and we got exactly what your way will always bring - defeat.

When you were at West Point or the War College did they teach you to repeat losing strategies over and over again in the forlorn hope that they would somehow become winners?

Mr. Powell if you can't stand to be in the same political party as people like Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, the memory of Ronald Reagan (and myself, bty) then leave it and become a Democrat.

Become a Democrat and attempt to use your influence to drag that party back from the lunatic fringe of extreme leftism where it finds itself now.

And what is it exactly that is "in the hearts and minds of African-American, Hispanic and Asian voters"?

Asians want an end to affirmative action in college admissions so that their children stop losing places to less qualified black, Hispanic and white applicants. I stand behind them 100% in this. If the student bodies of Stanford and Berkley and Harvard and other elite schools become 98% Asian it will give the rest of us a wakeup call and cause us to see to our own childrens' education.

Hispanics want unlimited immigration from south of the border and amnesty and easy citizenship for those illegals already here. That would have the effect of turning America into a virtual carbon-copy of Mexico. Is that what you really want Gen. Powell? Really?

And blacks seem to want (on issues not involving race) many of the same things that real Republicans want. Things like school choice and no gay "marriage". It's just that they have been brainwashed to believe that all Republicans are genocidal racists who want to send them back to the cotton patch in chains.

Well, Mr. Powell, the fact that you are at least nominally a Republican seems to argue that you don't buy into that fantasy so why don't you use your influence with your fellow African-Americans to educate them about the fact that the only form of slavery in force in America today is the enslavement of those who depend upon some form of government handout.

Oh, wait. If you did that you might not get asked to all the right Gerogetown cocktail parties and you might get so many interview requests from the mainstream media, at least not for friendly interviews.

Never mind.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

What is the point of having a hand recount of ballots in the Minnesota Senate race if the Democratic secretary of state is going to use the election night totals in precincts where it will benefit Democrat Al Franken?

Either the hand recount produces a better, more accurate count, or there was no point to the state spending roughly $100,000 to conduct the hand recount in the first place.

But that is exactly what the George Soros-supported secretary of state has agreed to do in the case of a Dinkytown precinct near the University of Minnesota. The hand recount of the liberal precinct produced 133 fewer ballots than the original count on election night and, more important, 46 fewer votes for Franken.

So he's proposing to defer to the election night total over the recount tally.

There are no "missing" ballots in Dinkytown. Ballots were run through the voting machines twice on election night. Last week, Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert explained they already knew for a fact that 129 ballots had been run through machines twice on election night, which pretty closely matched the 133 allegedly "missing" ballots.

As Reichert said, "There are human errors that are made on Election Day." According to an article in the Dec. 2, 2008, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Reichert was "confident that that's what happened" and that "we have all the ballot envelopes here."

But after relentless badgering by the Franken campaign, now Reichert isn't so sure anymore. So the new plan is for Minneapolis to submit both the election night total from Dinkytown -- which gives Franken an extra 46 votes -- and the meticulous hand recount total, which does not, and allow the canvassing board to decide which to use.

The 129 ballots that Reichert said were run through the machines twice on election night could end up being counted twice.

In all other precincts, the initial tallies from election night are treated as highly unreliable rough approximations of the actual vote, while the results from the hand recount are regarded as the absolute truth.

Only in the Dinkytown precinct, where the election night total gave Franken an additional 46 votes, does the state treat the hand recount as an error-prone joke compared to the highly accurate election night vote.

The Soros-supported Secretary of State Mark Ritchie explains that there is "precedent" for counting election night totals rather than the recount totals. If so, how about using the election night tally from some of the precincts that gave Coleman more votes on election night?

Highly implausible, post-election "corrections" in just three Democratic precincts -- Two Harbors, Mountain Iron and Partridge Township -- cost Coleman 446 votes. But I note that Ritchie doesn't propose deferring to the election night totals there.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed the 436-vote "correction" in Franken's favor to "exhausted county officials." Were they more exhausted in those three precincts than in Dinkytown?

Either the post-election tally is better than the election night tally or it isn't. Cherry-picking only those election night results Ritchie likes isn't an attempt to get an accurate vote-count; it's an attempt to get a Democrat in the U.S. Senate.

If Minnesota is going to accept the election night tally from Dinkytown, why not from any of these precincts where Coleman lost votes under far more suspicious circumstances? And why are guys named "Al" always caught trying to steal elections?

Wholly apart from the outrageous inconsistency of deciding that some election night tallies trump the hand recount and some don't, Franken's miraculous acquisition of more than 500 votes from heavily Democratic precincts in post-election "corrections" wasn't believable on its face -- and that's even accounting for the fact that Franken voters tend to be stupider than average and therefore more likely to fill out their ballots incorrectly.

Corrections in all other 2008 races combined led to only 482 changes in the entire state of Minnesota. The idea that typo "corrections" in one single contest from only three precincts, out of more than 4,000 precincts, could lead to 436 "corrections" benefiting Franken is manifestly absurd.

Ritchie's proposal to accept the election night count from one precinct is a stunning admission that even he doesn't believe a hand recount is any more accurate than the original election night tally.

To be sure, endlessly recounting ballots doesn't yield more accurate results, it just creates different results. There is no reason to think a tabulation is more accurate because it occurred later in time.

But then why have a recount at all? If the state of Minnesota is going to spend $100,000 and endless man-hours to conduct a meticulous hand recount on the grounds that it is more accurate, the state ought to at least pretend to believe in its own recount.

Election recounts are never intended to get more accurate results. They are simply opportunities for Democrats to manufacture new votes and steal elections.

And once again, Republicans are asleep at the wheel while another close election is being openly stolen by the man whose contributions to western civilization include the "Planet of The Enormous Hooters" sketch on "SNL."

Everything Miss Ann says here is true, but it simply doesn't seem that the Democrat machine in Minnesota is going to be able to manufacture enough extra Franken votes to push him over the top.

But I could be wrong. After all there might be another bag full of ballots marked for Franken in the men's room of the International Falls Greyhound station and they might be just enough to put him over the top.

Still I'll bet that Miss Ann is gnashing her teeth over the fact that editorial delay has kept her from commenting on the Great Illinois Senate Auction of 2008 in this week's column.

Some good news

ATLANTA (AP) - Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss handed the GOP a firewall against Democrats eager to flex their newfound political muscle in Washington, winning a bruising runoff battle Tuesday night that had captured the national limelight.

Chambliss' victory thwarted Democrats' hopes of winning a 60 seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. It came after a bitter month long runoff against Democrat Jim Martin that drew political luminaries from both parties to the state and flooded the airwaves with fresh attack ads weeks after campaigns elsewhere had ended.

This is good news indeed. Although Sen. Chambliss faltered earlier this year by joining a Lindsey Graham/John McCain "gang of" in order to gut Republican efforts to lift the ban on offshore drilling his record in Washington has been much more good than bad. The fact that Democrats will not now have an automatic veto-proof majority in the Senate is cause to celebrate.

This is especially welcome news because the failed comedian, failed radio talk show host and now failed political candidate Al Frankin is refusing to accept his loss to Norm Coleman in Minnesota. Frankin is seeking to have the Senate step in and declare the will of the Minnesota voters null and void and have himself installed in the seat that Coleman won fair and square.

If Frankin were the magical "60th vote" I have no doubt that Harry Reid, with the full backing of the little messiah, would do whatever it took to decree that he was the new Senator from Minnesota, and the expressed will of the voters be damned. But with Frankin's presence in the Senate not being so critical it is doubtful that they will risk the firestorm that would result in another blatantly stolen election.

It has just become a little eaiser to block the worst of the Democrat's plans to screw the nation into the ground so deeply that it can never crawl its way back into sunlight.

Some days the tiger gets you, but some days you do get the tiger.

The ignorance of hope

One of the things I've been wanting to draw you attention to was the Zogby poll of Obama voters (pdf of poll results here). The poll was commissioned by John Ziegler. Mr. Ziegler was filming a documentary about the 2008 election and was dismayed at the level of ignorance from those who had voted for Obama:

The 12-question, multiple-choice survey found questions regarding statements linked to Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his vice-presidential running-mate Sarah Palin were far more likely to be answered correctly by Obama voters than questions about statements associated with Obama and Vice-President–Elect Joe Biden. The telephone survey of 512 Obama voters nationwide was conducted Nov. 13-15, 2008, and carries a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percentage points. The survey was commissioned by John Ziegler, author of The Death of Free Speech, producer of the recently released film "Blocking the Path to 9/11" and producer of the upcoming documentary film, Media Malpractice...How Obama Got Elected.

"After I interviewed Obama voters on Election Day for my documentary, I had a pretty low opinion of what most of them had picked up from the media coverage of the campaign, but this poll really proves beyond any doubt the stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace," said Ziegler.

Ninety-four percent of Obama voters correctly identified Palin as the candidate with a pregnant teenage daughter, 86% correctly identified Palin as the candidate associated with a $150,000 wardrobe purchased by her political party, and 81% chose McCain as the candidate who was unable to identify the number of houses he owned. When asked which candidate said they could "see Russia from their house," 87% chose Palin, although the quote actually is attributed to Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey during her portrayal of Palin during the campaign. An answer of "none" or "Palin" was counted as a correct answer on the test, given that the statement was associated with a characterization of Palin.

Obama voters did not fare nearly as well overall when asked to answer questions about statements or stories associated with Obama or Biden -- 83% failed to correctly answer that Obama had won his first election by getting all of his opponents removed from the ballot, and 88% did not correctly associate Obama with his statement that his energy policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry. Most (56%) were also not able to correctly answer that Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground.

Nearly three quarters (72%) of Obama voters did not correctly identify Biden as the candidate who had to quit a previous campaign for President because he was found to have plagiarized a speech, and nearly half (47%) did not know that Biden was the one who predicted Obama would be tested by a generated international crisis during his first six months as President.

In addition to questions regarding statements and scandals associated with the campaigns, the 12-question, multiple-choice survey also included a question asking which political party controlled both houses of Congress leading up to the election -- 57% of Obama voters were unable to correctly answer that Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.

I doubt this comes as too great a shock to most conservatives. We all know that to be a left-liberal you have to be either stupid, ignorant or evil.

What is obvious from the survey is that most Obama voters (and since Obama won we have to say most voters in general) use the mainstream media as their primary source for information (that and Saturday Night Live). This is surprising since the readership/viewership for the MSM is in a nosedive with little chance of a recovery.

So how is it that they were able to exercise so much power?

My best guess is that those who don't normally follow the news realized that they needed to learn something about the candidates for the upcoming election and so they turned on the TV and watched whatever network news program they used to watch or remember their parents watching back when they were kids. That and picking up a copy of the local paper when they saw something about the election on the front page.

This means that we have our work cut out for us. We know that nearly everything that issues from the MSM is a lie (anything about global warming or Sarah Palin), a coverup (their coverage of the Obama campaign) or propaganda (again, their coverage of the Obama campaign).

The question is how we get the great mass of uninterested and uninformed people out there to know this as well.

I'm afraid there's no easy answer but the place to start is by doing what we bloggers do every day. Pick apart the MSM's coverage of anything and everything. Expose their lies like Charles Johnson did with Dan Rather's forged National Guard documents. And just as important hold them up to ridicule. Almost every adult knows enough about something to be considered an expert in that area. Ask them to think about the last newspaper or television news story they saw about that thing that they are an expert in. Then ask them if the newspaper or TV reporter got it right.

Chances are they'll say that the news item had serious mistakes or omissions. Then ask them why, if the media has proven itself to be consistently wrong about something that they know enough about to call the media on its errors, they are willing to believe the media on things about which they do not have specialized knowledge.

Many people will ignore this evidence but in many other people this will plant a seed of doubt.

Miss Ann is talking

That means that YOU are listening!

For the first time in 32 years, Democrats got more than 50 percent of the country to vote for their candidate in a national election, and now they want to lecture the Republican Party on how to win elections. Liberal Republicans have joined them, both groups hoping no one will notice that we just lost this election by running the candidate they chose for us.

For years, New York Times columnist David Brooks has been writing mash notes to John McCain. In November 2007, he quoted an allegedly "smart-alecky" political consultant who exclaimed, in private, "You know, there's really only one great man running for president this year, and that's McCain."

"My friend's remark," Brooks somberly intoned, "had the added weight of truth."

Brooks gushed, "I can tell you there is nobody in politics remotely like him," and even threw down the gauntlet, saying: "You will never persuade me that he is not among the finest of men."

That took guts at the Times, where McCain is constantly praised by the op-ed columnists and was endorsed by the paper in the Republican primary. Even Frank Rich has hailed McCain as the "most experienced and principled" of the Republicans and said no one in either party "has more experience in matters of war than the Arizona senator" -- the biggest rave issued by Rich since "Rent" opened on Broadway.

They adored McCain at the Times! Does anyone here not see a cluster of bright red flags?

In January this year, Brooks boasted of McCain's ability to attract "independents."

And then Election Day arrived, and all the liberals who had spent years praising McCain all voted for Obama. Independents voted for Palin or voted against Obama. No one outside of McCain's immediate family was specifically voting for McCain.

But now Brooks presumes to lecture Republicans about what to do next time. How about: "Don't take David Brooks' advice"?

According to Brooks, the reason McCain lost was -- naturally -- that he ran as a conservative. If only presidential candidates would spurn polls, modern political history, evidence from campaign rallies, facts on the ground and listen to the wishful thinking of Times columnists!

If McCain lost because he ran as a conservative, then how come I knew McCain was going to lose before Brooks did? About the same time Brooks was touting McCain's uncanny ability to attract independents, I was writing, accurately: "John McCain is Bob Dole minus the charm, conservatism and youth."

Using the latest euphemism for "liberal," Brooks complains that "reformist" Republicans like John McCain are forced to run for president as smelly old conservatives: "National candidates who begin with reformist records -- Giuliani, Romney or McCain -- immediately tack right to be acceptable to the power base." (Some "tack" so far to the right they almost adopt the positions in the GOP platform!)

In another sign of how popular liberalism is, liberals have to keep changing their name, like grifters moving from town to town. Liberal Republicans used to be known as "moderates," then "mavericks" or "centrists." I guess now they're "reformists." Why, liberals are so popular they have to disguise themselves for fear of being mobbed by an adoring public!

I gather by "reformist," Brooks means liberal only on the social issues like gay marriage and abortion because -- apart from abortion and gay marriage -- Rudy Giuliani was a right-wing lunatic. He engaged in aggressive policing, cut taxes and government bureaucracies, abolished New York's affirmative action office and was repeatedly denounced as a storm trooper by The New York Times.

The same thing goes for Romney, who also cut taxes and government regulations, but promised Massachusetts voters he would not tinker with their beloved abortion rights.

Ironically, McCain was a liberal on virtually every issue except abortion and gay marriage, but he bashed social conservatives to his friends in the press, so they excused his pro-life voting record as a cynical ploy to get votes in Arizona.

So "reformist" evidently means a Republican who is liberal on social issues. My term for that is "Joe Lieberman." Whatever the merit of being liberal on social issues, both Joe Lieberman and the Republican Party's history suggest that the winning formula is the exact opposite combination.

If liberals are going to use their first majority vote in a national election since Helen Thomas was spilling champagne on Liza at Studio 54 to lecture Republicans on how to win elections, I have a tip for them based on the exact same election: Constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed in every state they were on the ballot -- Florida, Arizona, even in liberal California.

I'll accept the results of the presidential election, if you anti-Proposition 8 die-hards in California accept the results of that vote. Earth to protestors: Most Americans oppose gay marriage. On this, even blacks and Mormons are agreed! Why don't you people go find something useful to do?

Let's see, who was avidly pro-gay-marriage? Oh I remember: The guy who's once again lecturing Republicans on how to win elections: David Brooks.

Miss Ann is, as usual, spot on.

I was alternately shouting from the rooftops and on my knees begging my fellow Republicans not to nominate that old worthless RINO because HE COULD NOT WIN. I and Miss Ann and Rush Limbaugh and so many others warned the Republican party that if the people were given a choice between a democrat and a Democrat that they would pick the Democrat.

But we let the media and, thanks to open primaries, Democrats (sorry, redundant) pick our nominee for us and we got exactly what we deserve for running a worthless RINO like John McCain.

And now the people who gave us John McCain are telling us that we need more of the same.

My advice to these people is to go ahead and switch to the Democrat party. If you think that McCain was the best man for the nomination then you are really a Democrat and you should just go ahead and make it official.

Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out and don't go away mad - just go away.

A dangerous game

Dr. John Lott looks at the attempt by the left to steal themselves another Senate seat:

Minnesota is becoming to 2008 politics what Florida was in 2000 or Washington State in 2004 -- a real mess. The outcome will determine whether Democrats get 58 members of the U.S. Senate, giving them an effective filibuster-proof vote on many issues.

When voters woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 -- a total change over 4 days of 504 votes.

Amazingly, this all has occurred even though there hasn’t even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today, and their final results will be sent to the secretary of state by Friday. The actual recount won’t even start until November 19.

Correcting these typos was claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races.

Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.

To put this change in perspective, that single precinct’s corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races.

The two other precincts (Mountain Iron in St. Louis county and Partridge Township in Pine county) accounted for another 100 votes each. The change in each precinct was half as large as the pickup for Obama from the corrections for the entire state.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to “exhausted county officials,” and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large.

Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482). It was also true that precincts that gave Obama a larger percentage of the vote were statistically more likely to make a correction that helped Franken.

The recent Washington State 2006 gubernatorial recount is probably most famous for the discovery of ballots in heavily Democratic areas that had somehow missed being counted the first and even second time around. Minnesota is already copying that, though thus far on a much smaller scale, with 32 absentee ballots being discovered in Democratic Hennepin County after all the votes had already been counted. When those votes are added in, they seemed destined to cut Coleman's lead further.

Indeed, it is probably through the discovery of new votes that Franken has his best shot of picking up new votes. Despite the press pushing a possible replay of election judges divining voters’ intentions by looking at “hanging chads” to see if voters meant to punch a hole, that shouldn’t be an issue in Minnesota. The reason is simple: optical scan vote counting machines return ballots to voters if no vote is recorded for a contested race.

The Associated Press piece with the title “Most Minn. Senate ‘undervotes’ are from Obama turf” misinformed readers about what undervotes really imply. The Minneapolis Star Tribune headline similarly claimed "An analysis of ballots that had a vote for president but no vote for U.S. senator could have recount implications."

Voters themselves insert their ballot into the machine that reads and records their votes, and if the machine finds that a vote isn’t recorded, voters can either mark the race that they forgot to mark or didn’t mark clearly. Or if voters “overvoted” and accidentally marked too many candidates, voters can also get a fresh ballot. There should be no role to divine voters’ intentions. If a voter wanted a vote recorded for a particular race, the machine tells him whether his vote in all the races was counted.

But voters also have the right not to vote in particular races. In this election, 0.4 percent of Minnesotans didn’t want to vote for president. The number for the Senate race was only slightly higher at 0.8 percent. For congressional and state House races, the rates were 3 and 3.5 percent.

This pattern of fewer people voting in less important elections has been observed as long as people have studied elections. There are always at least a few people who don’t vote for even the most closely contested races at the top of the ballot and fewer people follow and vote for races the farther down the ballot that you go. But this is not evidence of mistakes, quite the contrary.

With ACORN filing more than 43,000 registration forms this year, 75 percent of all new registrations in the state, Minnesota was facing vote fraud problems even before the election. Even a small percentage of those registrations resulting in fraudulent votes could tip this election.

To many, it just seems like too much of a coincidence that Minnesota's one tight race just happens to be the race with the most "corrected" votes by far. But the real travesty will be to start letting election officials divine voter's intent. If you want to discourage people from voting, election fraud is one sure way of doing it.

If what has happened in the past repeats itself Democrats will be successful in stealing another election and the legal apparatus will turn a blind eye.

I don't think the left realizes what a deeply dangerous game they are playing. Americans are willing to accept the governance of politicians who they dislike and did not vote for as long as they know that those politicians were fairly elected. Take away the underpinnings of Americans' faith in the honesty of the process and their willingness to tolerate what they disagree with can also disappear.

In Florida 2000 Americans witnessed the Democrat party attempt to use the Florida courts to rewrite the rules over and over again until they finally got the outcome they wanted. They read the stories about how left-wing "community organizers" with ACORN registered one person as many as 73 times and turned in voter registration forms filled out by people with names like "Mickey Mouse". They watched the governorship of Washington state being stolen by the miraculous appearance of thousands of previously unnoticed ballots which were all marked for the Democrat candidate.

They have watched the press, another foundation of a functional democracy, abandon its duty to be accurate reporters of the truth in order to become partisan advocates. This has been going on for decades but in the recent election it became so overt that major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post aren't' even bothering to deny it any more.

It has been said that there are three boxes which any free society must depend upon if it wishes to remain free. The first two are the soap box and the ballot box. As long as people are free to express their opinions and argue for their causes and the press is both able and willing to report on the debate in a fair and accurate manner the population can remain informed enough to make good choices in who will lead them.

And as long as they have the freedom to enter the voting booth and cast a ballot secure in the knowledge that it will be fairly counted and that their vote will not be diluted by fraud (ballot box stuffing, people voting more than once, people who are not legally entitled to vote being allowed to vote) they will accept the results and continue to obey the laws and give due respect to legal authority.

However if the people come to believe that the soap box and the ballot box have been corrupted and cannot be relied upon to produce results which fairly represent the will of the citizenry their last recourse will be to the third box, the cartridge box, and they resort to arms to redress their grievances.

The left has already destroyed the faith of the people in the traditional media and they are making serious (and public) plans to shut down the new media with the Orwellian "Fairness Doctrine".

If they are also allowed to destroy the public's faith in the electoral process by simply stealing (and in such an open manner) any election which they need to steal to get the number of legislative votes they need to be able to rule without effective opposition then a great many people just might start to see the cartridge box as the only remaining means of effective dissent.

If the left then pours gasoline on the fire that they have already ignited by trying to disarm the population many people are going to see the preservation of liberty through armed rebellion as a thing which they must do now or never.

If the left ever does manage to push America to the point of civil war they will lose. There simply aren't enough of them and they aren't the ones who own all the guns. We are.

It's an ill wind that blows no good

The nation faces some hard times ahead however there are some good things about Obama's victory that real Americans can be grateful for.

1. Hillary Clinton will never be president. She will not dare try to take the nomination away from her own party's incumbent president in 2012 and by the time 2016 rolls around she will be too old. It isn't fair or right that our society judges women more harshly on their appearance than it does men but it most certainly does. If Fred Thompson was too "old and decrepit" to be elected in eight years Mrs. Clinton will be as well.

2. There will not be a member of the Bush family on the ticket ever again.

3. The economy is entering a recession and it looks to be a bad one. The party in the White House always gets the blame for a bad economy and it is better that a Democrat wears the bullseye for the next four years. Especially since the Democrats are largely responsible for the mess we find ourselves in.

4. John McCain will not be the next president. If anyone doubts McCain's true character all you need to do is contemplate the look of orgasmic bliss on his face during his concession speech as he talked about how very eager he was to help Obama lead the nation. If McCain had been elected president the first thing he would have done was run "across the aisle" to repair relations with his good and dear friends on the extreme left-wing of the Democrat party. Then he would have dedicated himself to being the kind of president that the New York Times would approve of in glowing editorials. The Republican party clutched a viper to its bosom in John McCain. Not having his venom running through our veins for the next four years gives us a chance for survival.

5. Sarah Palin was introduced to the Republican party which promptly fell in love with her. Her ability to almost carry the moribund McCain campaign across the finish line makes her the front runner for the nomination in 2012.

6. The clueless idiots in the McCain wing of the Republican party are further discrediting themselves with their almost unbelievably crude and stupid attacks against Governor Palin.

7. The media unmasked itself and there is now not even the pretense of objectivity about them. The average American citizen now realizes that he cannot depend upon the network news or the daily newspaper to tell him the truth. This will only hasten the final collapse of the old media.

What now for the last, best hope?

I noticed several times during the past election season that if one wanted to fine print media which was covering the election the way actual journalists were supposed to report the news rather than as unpaid Obama press secretaries would it was necessary to go to the British media. Here is another example of that.

Peter Hitchens writing on the online version of the Daily Mail:

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

[. . .]

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

Mr. Hitchens is correct in his analysis of what Barack Obama and his party's leaders want for America. However he is wrong in believing that a majority of the American people voted for that program knowingly.

Exit polls show that 58% of the American electorate thought that Obama was going to lower their taxes. This does not indicate a people who entered the voting booth with the thought "I'm going to get me some socialism!".

The more success Obama has in enacting his agenda the worse off the nation is going to be and the more likely he will be to be a one-term failure like Jimmy Carter (who he closely resembles policy-wise).

Now some of THIS I believe

From the New York Times:

Ms. Palin. . . was the catalyst for a civil war between her campaign and Mr. McCain’s that raged from mid-September up until moments before Mr. McCain’s concession speech on Tuesday night. By then, Ms. Palin was in only infrequent contact with Mr. McCain, top advisers said.

“I think it was a difficult relationship,” said one top McCain campaign official, who, like almost all others interviewed, asked to remain anonymous. “McCain talked to her occasionally.”

But Mr. McCain’s advisers also described him as admiring of Ms. Palin’s political skills. He was aware of the infighting, they said, but it is unclear how much he was inclined or able to stop it.

The tensions and their increasingly public airing provide a revealing coda to the ill-fated McCain-Palin ticket, hinting at the mounting turmoil of a campaign that was described even by many Republicans as incoherent, negative and badly run.

Like I said. THIS I believe. In fact I would have been shocked if it had turned out any differently. John McCain is the blood enemy of conservatives and conservatism and Sarah Palin is the closest thing we have had to Ronald Reagan since his retirement in 1988.

One of the greatest fears that I had during the latter part of the campaign was that McCain, whose choice of Palin was - in his mind - nothing more than a gimmick and a bone to throw to conservatives, would come to realize that Mrs. Palin was far more popular than he was and that if he won it would only be because of her. I feared that this would ignite McCain's legendary temper and cause him to freeze her out of the campaign or even cut her down publicly in some way.

It would seem that McCain did resent her popularity but that he retained enough reason to continue to make public appearances with her. After all it was only her presence that allowed McCain to draw a crowd of any size.

It would be difficult to overstate how pleased I am to hear that Governor Palin went into this campaign with an agenda of her own. Her political instincts are surely good enough to have realized that a McCain victory was all but impossible (remember, if you give the public a choice between a democrat and a Democrat they will pick the Democrat). That she saw the campaign as a convenient vehicle to establish herself on the national stage and further her own presidential ambitions has me almost weeping with relief.

The greatest fear that I have had since last Tuesday is that Mrs. Palin would go back to Alaska and swear off national politics because of the incredibly vile treatment she received at the hands of the media, the left-wing of the Democrat party (sorry, redundant) and even her own party and her own campaign's "insiders".

That doesn't seem likely to happen and that gives me some hope for the ultimate survival of the Republic.

A Hollywood star who isn't a moron

Last night a friend of mine asked me if I had seen the Chuck Norris 2nd Amendment ad that ran before the election. I hadn't because I get my TV through a satellite dish and there weren't all that many political ads on Direct TV. But everything makes its way to YouTube sooner or later so I was able to find it:



I agree with my friend. Chuck Norris is now my hero. There are Hollywood stars who are big gun collectors, including Arnold and Sylvester Stallone, who have never so much as lifted a finger or uttered one word in defense of their fellow citizens' 2nd Amendment rights. Then there are big Hollywood names like, Stephen Spielberg, who collect guns and love to shoot but who actively support more gun control laws and gun banning politicians.

Then there are stars who will come out in support of gun owners rights like the late Charlton Heston who became the face and voice of the NRA and Tom Selleck who has done "I'm the NRA" ads but neither Selleck nor Heston has ever been photographed (for an NRA ad) holding anything other than a flintlock musket or a double barreled shotgun. And none of the stars who have gone on the record supporting their fellow gun owner's rights has ever gotten specific about their support for SELF DEFENSE as a primary reason to own a firearm.

Until Chuck Norris.

Of course Chuck hasn't got much to lose as far as his standing with the Hollywood elites is concerned. In addition to being a gun owner and advocate for 2nd Amendment rights Mr. Norris is a couple of other things that Hollywood hates. He is a conservative Republican, a police officer and a committed Evangelical Christian.

If it wasn't for the fact that the people who actually go to movies and watch TV shows love him so much he wouldn't have a career at all.

The Norris ad reminded me of this gun store commercial that I saw on YouTube a while back.



Only the government of the UK and American left-wing loons like Joe Biden wouldn't think of that as a happy ending.

Palin responds to the lies

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Gov. Sarah Palin denounced anonymous criticisms leveled at her by former John McCain aides as lies, including allegations that Republican lawyers were traveling to Alaska to reclaim her high-priced wardrobe and that she didn't know Africa was a continent.

"Those accounts are not true," the former Republican vice presidential candidate said in her first public comments on the matter since the election Tuesday.

Palin returned Friday to her Anchorage governor's office and said she had no immediate plans to build on her newfound national name-recognition and popularity with the Republican base for a possible 2012 presidential run.

Instead, Palin said, she wanted only to get back to the governor's desk to advance a proposed pipeline tapping Alaska's vast North Slope natural gas reserves and to prepare Alaska's proposed 2010 budget.

CNN (of all things!) investigated the weird allegations that were leveled against Governor Palin and found them to be utterly false. This is why you don't see them burning their way through the media right now. Anyone who reports on them as anything but a hoax will look like a deranged fool.

Of course the left-wing loon websites will always take them as gospel but they already thought that she was a corrupt incestuous adulteress so what are you going to do? The fact that the nutjobs who post on places like dailykos hate her is one of the best recommendations she could ask for.

There are two interesting questions about why these accusations were made. One is the why of it. Why are McCain "insiders" leaking vile lies about the woman they picked and vetted? The other is why they thought they could get away with spreading a bunch of false rumors which could easily and quickly be discredited.

The answer to the first question is partly that they want a scapegoat for the failure of themselves and their candidate but mostly it is an attempt to preserve the dominance within the Republican party of the "McCain wing", that is the moderate/liberal/"reach across the aisle"/country club - Blue blood wing of the party. You know the ones I'm now calling the Defeat Wing. This is something I'm going to write more about later today so check back in if you are interested.

The second question, about why they thought they could get away with it, is simple to answer. They thought the press would cover for them. Whenever anyone from the Democrat party lies about any conservative the media simply assumes that the lie is true and it becomes part of the accepted narrative. Whenever John McCain has ever lied about and trashed his fellow Republicans the media has just accepted whatever he said as being true as well.

So these scumbag "McCain insiders" just thought that the media would accept what they were saying as absolute truth and make no effort whatsoever to do any kind of fact checking.

The real puzzler is why CNN (of all things!) bothered to do any kind of investigation and then why they reported on the fact that the lies were in fact lies.

Perhaps someone over at CNN has some trace of journalistic ethics left? Perhaps this was an act of contrition to remove some of the guilt associated with colluding with a Marxist presidential candidate in his efforts to lie his way into office and ruin the country?

Whatever the reason the refutation got out there quickly enough to keep the lies from becoming part of the public narrative of the campaign and for that we can be grateful.

PS - there's another really big question here. Any time in the campaign when someone on the Republican side would do so much as mention Barack Obama's middle name McCain would break the speed of light to get to a camera and denounce that person. So why did he not utter one public word of condemnation of the slanders against Gov. Palin? She's only the person who almost put him in the White House.

Why we lost

The election of 2008 is over and now conservatives can begin their real battle. There is a war going on for the soul of the Republican party and the moderate/centrist/liberal wing of the party is going to do everything in its power to cement their control and drive out social conservatives, gun owners and religious believers.

You might think that this will be difficult for them since their chosen candidate, John McCain, just went down to a humiliating defeat. However defeat doesn't bother this bunch. They KNOW that if they get their way that the Republican party will be a permanent minority and they are fine with that.

They will have enough power on the fringes to get the things they really care about done, like having loopholes inserted into the tax code so that they can hide their personal wealth and they will be invited to all the right cocktail parties and they won't be embarrassed by having people at those parties ask them to "explain" Jerry Falwell or Sarah Palin.

One of the tactics that the Defeat Wing of the Republican party is going to use is the attempt to make any rational analysis of the Republican defeat off limits by disallowing any effort to blame McCain. The next thing they are going to do is attempt to destroy Sarah Palin because they see in her another Ronald Reagan who has the potential to capture the heart and the imagination of the nation and pull the party and the nation back to the right.

I The following article by George Neumayr from the American Spectator's website touches on the truth about why the GOP lost this election and reveals some of the Defeat Wing's opening salvos against Governor Palin.

According to Newsweek, "On the Sunday night before the last debate, McCain's core group of advisers -- Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, adman Fred Davis, strategist Greg Strimple, pollster Bill McInturff and strategy director Sarah Simmons -- met to decide whether to tell McCain that the race was effectively over, that he no longer had a chance to win. The consensus in the room was no, not yet, not while he still had 'a pulse.'"

This spirit of defeat explains why McCain staffers spent the last week or so of the campaign leaking against Sarah Palin. By the end of the race, the choicest pieces of inside-the-beltway elitism were coming not from Barack Obama but from McCain's own staffers. Palin and family, the staffers let it be known, were clinging to their God, guns, and newfound Neiman Marcus items.

"Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast." That is the description Newsweek received from an "angry aide."

That the staffers had given up by October also explains why the most potent attack on Obama came not from the campaign but from pure happenstance outside it: Joe the plumber's accidental meeting with Obama.

McCain acted like that was the first time he had ever heard Obama's thoughts on economic redistribution. Had the campaign exhausted its opposition research budget at Neiman Marcus? To anyone even remotely paying attention, Obama's understanding of taxation as tool of economic redistribution was clear long before Joe the plumber arrived on the scene. Obama had used the word redistribution repeatedly in his writings and speeches.

McCain's last-minute reliance on the gimmick of Joe the plumber made it easy for the media to dismiss his charge of "socialism" against Obama as feeble name-calling. Many months early, the McCain campaign could have been developing that case, and it wouldn't have taken much effort: Obama had let slip socialist, even Marxian, assumptions in his thinking several times, from his Marxian description of religion as an opiate for the masses to his bald calls for "confiscating" the profits of oil companies to his open class warfare.

By the end of the race, the McCain campaign seemed to depend on the latest Drudge Report links for the few talking points it could rouse itself to make. Obama's casual comment about bankrupting the coal industry had been gathering dust for months, only becoming an issue via Drudge at the last moment.

Even when the campaign occasionally stumbled down a promising avenue of attack, it would stop and dart down a new cul-de-sac. Take the ad it ran early on about Obama's work with Planned Parenthood to spread sex-ed propaganda in elementary schools. That ad hit its target squarely enough to generate days of grousing from Joe Biden and, in a rare moment of irritation, Barack Obama. Obama's surrogates in the press also spent days frowning over the ad, another measure of its effectiveness. But where was the follow-up?

The McCain campaign could have rolled out a series of such ads. Instead, social conservatism was henceforth treated by the McCain campaign as a no-go area. For example, the day after the Connecticut Supreme Court imposed gay marriage on the people there, McCain said nothing about the decision. Not a word as far as I could tell was even spoken during the campaign about Obama's de facto support for gay marriage.

Meanwhile, Obama was running ad after ad about his belief in "parental responsibility," crafting an unchallenged image of himself as a centrist. Accidentally, Obama ended up doing more to pass the traditional marriage initiative Proposition 8 in California than McCain: the high turnout of blacks to vote for Obama meant they also voted on Proposition 8, which they supported overwhelmingly.

That McCain lost while traditional marriage amendments across the country, no thanks to him, won is a fitting final note to the haplessness of his campaign. The media perked up briefly in October at the possibility of a rift when Palin strayed from the McCain script by endorsing the marriage amendments. But that quickly passed and the campaign staffers got back to topics of more interest to them, such as, if Newsweek is right, Palin's jackets and John McCain's inevitable defeat.

Of course the Defeat Wing's attacks against Sarah Palin are nothing but a pack of lies. The unfailingly cheerful and energetic Sarah Palin the nation saw on the campaign trail bears absolutely no resemblance to the fictional construct of the Defeat Wing's diseased imagination.

This is an attempt to be the first out of the gate with an "official narrative" of why McCain lost and to have the blame fall squarely on the conservative Palin rather than the RINO McCain.

Be thankful for small favors

We can be grateful that Obama's margin of victory in the popular vote was great enough that it will not give birth to any "ACORN stole the election" conspiracy theories.

One of the most corrosive influences on American politics over the past eight years has been the myth of the stolen election from Florida in 2000. Even though a group of left-wing newspapers, led by the New York Times, went to Florida and counted every ballot and concluded that Bush won fair and square the left was never able to abandon the illusion that Gore was the "real" president and that every single thing that Bush did was illegitimate.

This was the largest single factor in creating the phenomena of Bush Derangement Syndrome in which the left was unable to credit President Bush with doing anything right even when what he did was entirely in line with their own program.

The "Stolen Election" isn't the only myth to have disastrous effects on a nation. After WWI the myth of the "Stab in the Back", which said that the German army was not defeated by its enemies on the battlefield but was stabbed in the back by sinister domestic forces (The Jews), helped prepare the way for Hitler's rise to power.

We do not need to fall into Obama Derangement Syndrome. If Obama tries to fulfill his promises to bring about a trillion dollars in new spending and to declare war upon the productive sector of the American economy conservatives will have plenty to legitimately criticize him about. Remember how the left sacrificed every last shred of its credibility by chasing "Florida 2000" off into the outer fringes of loon-land. We cannot let that become us.

Is American now a left-wing nation?

Some people have speculated that Obama's victory means that the nation has deliberately chosen to take a turn to the left. That we are no longer a center-right nation but have become center-left or maybe even just left in our outlook.

I do not believe this to be true for several reasons. One is that Obama made his signature issue tax cuts. Exit polls showed that 58% of the electorate believed that Obama would cut their taxes. This does not indicate a population which is desiring a shift to the left.

Second the Wall Street Journal has an article today about how voters in various places voted against a number of environmentalist wacko ballot measures. The left has hung many of its hopes of robbing Americans of their wealth and freedom on environmentalism. Its rejection by voters does not indicate a nation eager to lurch to the left.

Then we have voters in Arizona rejecting a ballot measure which would have made it easier for employers to hire illegal aliens and voters in California approving a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage.

Again not signs that the electorate is swinging leftward.

In the end what happened Tuesday was that Obama, with the help of a media which was totally in the tank for him, was able to convince voters that he was a moderate Democrat in the Bill Clinton mold who would cut their taxes and bring back the prosperity of the 90's while healing the nation's racial divisions.

Not a shift to the left, just proof that you really can "fool all of the people some of the time".

Some lessons

From Taipei Times:

Democrat Senator Barack Obama won most of the votes from women, blacks and Hispanics and siphoned off enough white support to leave Republican Senator John McCain with no way to win.

[. . .]

Obama drew the votes of two-thirds of Hispanic voters — heavily courted by both candidates — and 95 percent of blacks who went to the polls.

A healthy lead among women voters typically is key to a Democratic presidential victory, and Obama attracted 56 percent of their votes. He split the overall male vote with McCain.

[. . .]

Obama, who will become the first black president and at age 47 one of the youngest, ran away with the youth vote. He won the under-30 crowd by 34 percentage points, even better than Democrat Bill Clinton’s 19-point advantage when he defeated Bob Dole in 1996.

First lesson. I and the others who screamed from the rooftops that it was a mistake for the GOP to embrace amnesty and open borders have been vindicated. John McCain was the leader of the amnesty movement and Hispanic voters rejected him by an overwhelming margin.

Second lesson. Women's suffrage was a mistake if you judge its results by the standards of the women who originally advocated for it.

The women who began the push for granting women the right to vote argued that because wives were already accustomed to managing the household budget that women voters would be fiscal conservatives who would hold the government to strict standards of fiscal discipline and accountability.

They also argued that because women tended to be more sincere and devout in their Christian religious faith that women voters would cause the government to hew more closely to Christian morality and more effectively uphold Christian values and principles.

Today we know that women voters are the biggest supporters of the legalized murder of children and the most fanatical supporters of the ruinous welfare state. If Susan B Anthony and the others were telling the truth about what they hoped for women's suffrage to achieve then they must surely be turning over in their graves.

The fact is that the Founders realized that a universal franchise would destroy the nation so they limited the vote to those who they believed had the greatest stake in the survival of the nation as a free and prosperous place and at the time of the founding that was white male landowners.

The "white" part of the equation is now obsolete but not the "male" part and not the idea behind the "landowner" part.

Taking these criteria in turn we first come to "white". This was simply an artifact of 18th century attitudes about race which we have moved beyond.

"Male" we have already touched upon but the question is why do women tend to vote in ways which will destroy the nation? The answer is revealed in the fact that most married women vote Republican while most single women vote Democrat. Women are hardwired to seek a protector and provider. This is because pregnancy and caring for small children makes them vulnerable and limits their ability to gather their own food. This doesn't mean that all women will always act the same way just that there is a predisposition to act in a certain way among the entire population of women which will make the majority of them act in certain ways most of time.

Single women are tend to place government in the place of protector and provider, causing them to vote for the party which seeks to make government richer and more powerful. But when a woman marries a man whom she loves and trusts a chemical switch trips in her brain and she stops seeking a protector and provider. This allows married women to engage the political process with their intellect rather than their emotions and tends to make them Republicans.

All humans have this biological programming. It is God's way of ensuring that the current generation creates the next generation and that we take proper care of them until they are able to take care of themselves.

Then we come to "landowner". At the time of the founding the gentleman farmer sat at the top of the social pyramid. Professional men like lawyers and doctors and skilled workers like blacksmiths and carpenters saved their money against the day in which they could buy their very own farm and till the land.

This attitude was why George Washington wished for his epitaph not to be "father of his country" but simply "he was a farmer".

So the Framers restricted the franchise to landowners because the land holding farmer was the backbone of the economy in their day and they wanted the only people voting to be those who had a stake in the preservation of the nation as it was then constituted.

Who comprises the backbone of the nation's economy today? The answer is the investor class. Whether you are investing in your own business or holding publicly traded stock the fact that you have risked your capital to build something makes you the 21st century gentleman farmer.

Final lesson. Obama ran away with the youth vote. That is those who are least knowledgeable, least experienced and most immature chose Obama. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

If you want to achieve liberty and prosperity for the United States of America and lock those conditions in to as near a state of permanence as possible the best way to achieve that goal is to restrict the franchise to men and married women who either own successful businesses (successful being defined as generating a profit large enough for the owners to live on) or have a significant part of their net worth invested in stocks or non-government bonds. The age when one becomes eligible to vote should be 30 unless you join the active duty military, in which case you should receive the franchise immediately even if you are 17 and joining under a parental waiver.

Many will complain that this is not fair and they will be right. However "fairness" is not the goal The goal is to achieve the maximum amount of individual liberty and prosperity. "Fairness" expressed as universal suffrage has gotten us nothing but the welfare state, massive national debt, sky high taxes and Barack Obama in the White House.

Clearly "fairness" is not a worthwhile goal and we should abandon it for the much more desirable rewards of freedom and wealth.

Be careful what you wish for

I'm going to say something critical of Sean Hannity so first let me give credit where credit is due. Sean Hannity was one of the three people (the others being Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber) who almost succeeded in dragging John McCain across the finish line.

However Mr. Hannity said something on his radio show yesterday which was just plain stupid.

Sean said that he really doesn't thing that President Obama will be successful, but that he wishes him success. I know that he is trying to show himself as being superior to the Democrats who fell into Bush Derangement Syndrome however he really needs to think about what he is wishing for.

Barack Obama is an extreme left-wing socalist who wants to remake America into a place the Founders would not recognize.

For the good of the country I hope he fails utterly! I hope there is a backlash so bad that when Obama leaves office in four years America is more conservative than it has ever been in its history!

I'm sure that what Hannity actually meant was that he hopes that Obama will not be the man that his past histroy and associations reveal him to be. I wish for this as well. I wish that the real Obama will turn out to be the man who campaigned for office on the promise of sweeping tax cuts and that he will govern from the center like Bill Clinton mostly did and that the nation will prosper economiacally like it did during Clinton's time in office.

However wishing is good time wasted and there is very little hope that Obama will turn out to be anything other than the kind of man who would take pleasure in the company of men like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, that is a blood enemy of the United States.

By the way, as long as we're talking about talk radio Mark Levin had the best response to the elections on his show last night.

And still on the subject of talk radio I did not watch any of the election coverage on TV. Instead I listened to Levin's show on Sirius radio which led into Cam and Company and their NRA radio show. That was the best election coverage I've ever experienced. Even though the news was mostly bad it was still very well done. That is how I will spend all my upcoming election nights.

Taking the good with the bad, part 2

This actually hurts worse than losing the White House:

Traitor Jack Murtha was able to hold on to his House seat. I suppose that it was the high turnout in support of Obama which put this wretched and detestable corrupt little man over the top.

Apparently the people in Murtha's district are not rednecks and racists. They are just fools who vote for crooked politicians who call them racists and rednecks.

Here is an open letter to the Pennsylvania Republican party which was written by Leo J. Pusateri, Jr. and posted on Murtha Must Go, the blog he founded and which I have the honor to be a sometime contributer to:


To the leadership of PA-GOP...

I guess I don't understand it.

You have had a chance to knock off the most corrupt, democrat congressman, possibly in the history of the United States, who sits ensconsed in your own backyard much like Jabba the Hut, and you keep on shooting yourselves in your collective kneecap. Jack Murtha slanders and unlawfully convicts those who put their lives on the line to defend us and our way of life, and you don't so much as lift a finger to depose his ass. Alternately, you actually enable his re-election.

You didn't lift a finger when Diana Irey ran against the gasbag in '06.

You were active in trying to keep Lt. Col.William Trower Russell, an honorable veteran, off the ballot; he had to get in on a write-in campaign after the local GOP had him tossed off!!

You chose not to take an active part in deposing a democrat politician who has lived high on the taxpayer hog for thirty-four (soon to be 36) friggen years!!

And then you have the gall to still want money from your constituents???

Since May 19 of 2006, after Murtha played judge, jury and executioner to the Haditha Marines, I (and some talented, like-minded friends) have maintained the blog, Murtha Must Go!!

Isn't it kind of pathetic that people from around our nation, myself being from Minnesota, others from Chicago, etc., who clearly recognize what a scourge Congressman Murtha is on the national political scene, care more and do more to expose Murtha than does the Pennsylvania GOP???

Are you that comfortable wallowing in Murtha's abject debauchery that you, too, are willing to look the other way?

Are you, as are many a corn-fed dependent PA-12 constituent, blinded by the pork?

Must the remainder of the people in this nation, disgusted by Murtha's traitorous behavior that has literally taken its toll in lost lives, continue to do the heavy lifting that the PA GOP continues to refuse to do?

Don't get me wrong. I'm still going to go after Murtha. I'm still going to expose the corruption, and I won't rest until he either gets unseated or takes a well-deserved frog march and perp-walk in front of a thousand cameras.

But it would be nice to get a little help once in a while.

Sincerely,

Leo J. Pusateri, Jr.

Founder and Editor of Murtha Must Go!!

This attitude of the Pennsylvania GOP goes a long way to explain why a state which is mostly rural and full of gun owners and religious believers who live their personal lives as conservatives keeps voting for left-wing scum like Jihad Jack Murtha and the little messiah.

Taking the good with the bad, part 1

First some of the good news.

Al Franken was not able to defeat Norm Coleman. It was a very close vote but Franken's total is lower. You can go here to see the numbers and a red/blue map of Minnesota.

With the total so close I would imagine that there will be an automatic recount but all looking more closely at the votes will likely do is result in a bunch of ACORN generated fraudulent Franken votes being thrown out.