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“What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”
 
“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let’s be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy.
 
“The other kills her own food.”

Gerard Baker

For the first time ever in this election cycle the GOP actually has momentum.

We were watching this election slowly trickle down our pantlegs, until last night.

But now McCain and Palin have gone off-script.

The planned ritual execution of the Old White Guys before the coronation of His Holiness Barack I is now officially not-going-as-scheduled.

McCain threw a barracuda into the swimming pool. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t.

But it has made life interesting, for now.

(And it has made Obama’s defensive eat-up-the-clock approach look ill-advised. It has also made his, or his wife’s, rejection of Hillary look like the weak decision it was. Real leaders have the stones to surround themselves with the strongest people in their own party. JKF took LBJ, Reagan took Bush I, Clinton took Gore. That is how the pols with balls do it.)

The MSM and the Donks are stunned.

But they won’t stay stunned.

Their initial volley of vicious slime attacks and jeering, arrogant condescension have failed. The Donks and their MSM allies, the ones who are assigned to do the dirty work, will now come back like cornered rats, like animals. It is going to get way, way worse.

Expect a massive and vicious counter-attack, possibly based on some purported “new revelations” of corruption, against Palin to begin today or tomorrow. No doubt Mr. Axelrod and his team, Obama’s brain, are working hard right now on the counter-attack.

They have to destroy her now.

Gov. Palin and her family are going to have an ugly two months.

UPDATE 1: “I’m really looking forward to the VP debates. And - for the first time - the election itself, although there’s a lot of water between here and there, and something tells me that the long knives are being sharpened.” Neptunus Lex (The Other Lex!) gets it.

UPDATE 2: I laughed out loud at the spirit of this, and its apparent accuracy:

There’s also more to the pit bull thing: Why do they bite so hard? Because that is what they love to do most in life. And it’s not funny, unless the person get chewed up richly deserves it. She even found a funny, extemporaneous (apparently) way to say explicitly that she was, in fact, a pit bull, though one with lipstick. Translation: I wear lipstick and I am your worst nightmare.
 
This lady was not fighting for her life. She was having the time of her life. She’s a stone fighter, not the kind of victim the bullies want. I begin to get the barracuda moniker. A natural born killer. I think I’m in love.

The Right Coast

UPDATE 3: Here’s the photo of Gov. Palin with the moose she bagged. I’d heard about it, but I had not seen it before. Looks like good eatin’.

Jim has been quiet lately, and his insights have been missed.

His analysis is too good to be left buried in the comments:

The McCain-Palin campaign needs to address the experience question head-on, and they need to do so by working from Palin’s strengths, not by sweeping objections under the rug. This should be done by announcing several areas in which she would take the lead within the administration, areas where her existing strengths give her plausibility. Three areas suggest themselves immediately.
 
1. North American energy and trade policy. The most important substantive accomplishment of her administration has been the natural-gas pipeline deal with Canada, that she was a key figure in brokering and pushing. The Financial Times gave her credit for this accomplishment weeks ago, when nobody thought she had a chance for the VP slot. Have her make a speech as soon as possible before a major energy or trade meeting in Canada, where she will give a preview of the McCain-Palin policy for energy cooperation with Canada. Cite her pipeline experience frequently. Get in digs at Obama for playing the anti-NAFTA card in the primaries, and against Biden for having voted against the pipeline when it was first an issue decades ago. Play up her experience as an Arctic governor and show sympathy for Canada’s Arctic issues, including the undersea resource claims we and Canada will soon be disputing with Putin. Maybe follow that with a trip to Iqaluit, being sure to bring her husband. Up there, talk about America and Canada’s common Arctic and Inuit/Eskimo heritage.
 
Obama has done nothing as important or complex, or as international, as the pipeline deal. Not to mention Biden.
 
2. Middle-class/blue-collar issues. The Republicans need to hone their “Sam’s Club” agenda. She’s the person to do it. Adopt the Romney proposal for a realistic (at least 10K per kid) child credit, and be sure it’s deductible against parroll tax. And pledge to revisit and reform Joe Biden’s (D-MNBA) bankruptcy bill, making sure to repeat ten zillion times that it was Biden’s baby. She can take credit for convincing McCain to revisit his previous position and decide it needs reforming.
 
3. Native community issues. Not only are her husband (and kids) part-Eskimo, Palin had to deal costantly with the powerful “native corporations” as governor. The Bureau of Indian Affairs and its programs are an ongoing national disgrace. Let Palin head up a task force to entirely revamp [programs for native communities. This might sway enough votes in New Mexico to swing the state their way, and would count in several other Western states that are leaners.
 
So here are three “mules” for Sister Sarah to ride - - to office.

Jim also added this:

Here’s a story on Bloomberg from Aug. 1 about the pipeline deal, before the media got the talking points from the Obama campaign to pretend that Palin has accomplished nothing significant:

Mark Brown, a liberal columnist in the Sun Times, had this to say about Gov. Palin.

Leave her alone. Let it go. Don’t even think about going there. It’s a setup. It’s a trap.
 
I wanted to shout that advice to the Barack Obama campaign Friday, but somebody on the television was telling me it was already too late: Obama’s people had reacted initially to the news of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s candidacy for vice president by belittling her credentials.
 
For Pete’s sake, there’s no reason to do that. Let it happen on its own. Let the media do the dirty work.

Once in a while the mask slips and people blurt out the truth. Here we see Mr. Brown admitting what every rational person knows already. The news media is Obama’s ally, it is partisan, it is in effect an arm of the Democratic Party, engaged in this election on behalf of Sen. Obama. This goes far beyond “liberal bias”, which is also obvious to anyone paying attention. The mainstream media are Obama’s protectors and cheering section. The press area at the Denver convention was full of people with press passes, cheering and chanting along. They are on the team.

The news media is not interested in reporting news about Gov. Palin, or being fair or objective. It is interested in “…belittling her credentials”, it is interested in doing “the dirty work” on behalf of Sen. Obama, to help him win. Brown, who ought to know, since he works at the Sun Times, is telling us that his industry will run interference all the way for Sen. Obama, until he is in the White House, allowing him and his campaign to take the high road.

Thank God these people no longer have a monopoly on news.

Thank God they are part of a dying industry which will not be missed.

BTW, lets all start referring to Sarah Palin as governor. She is the only executive out of the four people at the top of the two tickets. Gov. Palin deserves to be referred to by her office.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett sent this great photo of Gov. Palin with a caribou which is headed for the stew pot. Here’s hoping Sen. Biden is in similar shape, metaphorically of course, after their debate.

UPDATE 2: Lisa Schiffren has an excellent piece about Gov. Palin, and why she has excited the GOP base. It had a nice, big impact on McCain fundraising, which is an objective demonstration of new support. The news media has been mostly wrong about the rationale for this pick. It is much more about mobilizing the party base, and getting the many, many unhappy, reluctant GOP voters excited and willing to work, contribute and vote. The idea that lots of Hillary voters would come over is not plausible. Democrats are good soldiers and will vote for their party on election day. It is much more about taking away the “look-at-the-two-boring-white-guys” theme than about, “I-am-woman-hear-me-roar.” Gov. Palin’s femaleness, in other words, checks one of Sen. Obama’s offensive plays, while her substantive positions mobilize the base.

I am so happy about this.

She is everything McCain is not:

* young
* female
* pro-life (vocally, unlike McCain, who is actually sound on his voting)
* pro-gun (vocally, she recently bagged a moose!)
* pro-oil drilling in ANWR
* has executive experience (not much, but more than Obama and Biden)
* against taxes, government spending, and the culture of boondoggles in Alaska

Also, critically important, she is probably the only person who can reconcile both the traditionalist conservatives and the libertarian conservatives, where both groups do not like McCain. Palin may be able to get them on board.

McCain is behind. He will probably lose. Ignore the polls. Look at Intrade. Look at the British oddsmakers. It is 2/1 for Obama and has been all along. The polls are noise around the signal. If McCain plays it safe, he loses for sure. He has to make high-risk, high-return plays. He has to throw Hail Mary passes. He needs put the board in play. This decision shows he understands that and is willing to act accordingly. You can’t play it safe when you are losing.

Still, I am shocked by this. I wanted it to be Palin. I saw no way he could win if he did not pick Palin. Two white guys in suits against Obama were going to lose, period. But I thought he would still do something “safer”, which would have doomed him. McCain is much bolder and much smarter than I gave him credit for.

In fact, as I think about it, this is the first moment when I have not been absolutely certain McCain would lose.

McCain is also showing, as he has generally, that he is very aggressive and confident, almost cocky. His congratulation message to Obama was classic. It showed class and it showed fearlessness, and a certain condescension to Obama. It reminds me of David Hackett Fischer’s depiction of the Backcountry selection process for leaders: Tanistry. The Border Scots selected a Thane based on age, strength and cunning, not mere seniority. McCain is a backcountryman by ancestry. They are wily and they are fighters. McCain already seems to be inside Obama’s OODA loop. Making this pick the day after the Donk convention, to steal the buzz, is tactically perfect.

Apparently Palin talks like a hick. She calls herself a “momma” unironically, instead of a mom or a mother. This will cause her to be mocked and jeered at in states the GOP is already going to lose. But it cannot hurt with blue collar voters in WV, OH, PA and MI, which are states Obama could lose.

Key moment: The Palin v. Biden debate. She has zero foreign policy experience. She will have a lot of homework to do.

According to Wikipedia “In 1984, Palin was second-place in the Miss Alaska beauty pageant”. I can believe it. The whole schtick of pretty-woman-with-dorky-glasses-and-hair-in-a-bun works for me. I think most adult heterosexual males would agree.

Finally, McCain is doing something very important for the GOP. If he loses, as he still probably will, and if Palin makes a good impression during the election, which she may, then we will be well-positioned to run a woman governor at the top of the ticket in 2112 against President Obama.

[T]he British economy began its long boom, combining economic growth with price stability. Loss-making industries were closed down or reduced in size. Manufacturing industries shed labor, often while increasing output, as they restructured to meet foreign competition. New companies or entrepreneurs from academic and non-industrial backgrounds established new industries in the financial services, information, and high-tech sectors. Privatization transformed inefficient state-owned industries into dynamic private sector enterprises. New financial instruments allowed entrepreneurs to take over sluggish low-earning companies and put their assets to more profitable uses.
 
In general, Thatcher’s British economy, like Reagan’s revived U.S. economy, was characterized by change, profitability, growth, the better allocation of resources (including labor), and the emergence of new industries—indeed of an entirely new economy—based on the information revolution.

John O’Sullivan. RTWT.

We are so far into the era of the Big Lie about Mrs. Thatcher and what she accomplished, that it is good to refresh our recollections from time to time.

While America has a legitimate concern in encouraging former Soviet states to develop into market democracies, there is no intrinsic economic or strategic American vital interest in Georgia per se and even less in South Ossetia. Georgia is our ally for only two reasons: Tblisi was enthusiastic to send troops to help in Iraq in return for military aid and it occupies a strategic location for oil and gas pipelines that will meet future European energy needs. In other words, Georgia’s role is of a primary strategic interest to the EU, not the United States. Which is why European and British companies have such a large shareholder stake in the BTC pipeline and why European FDI in Georgia exceeds ours. Yet it will be American troops in Georgia handing out bottled water and MREs, not the Bundeswehr or the French Foreign Legion. Something does not compute here.

Mark Safranski, a/k/a Zenpundit.

Mark has an excellent post on Pajamas Media entitled Let’s Not Rush into Cold War II, which the quote above comes from. RTWT.

See also a post on his site with additional comments and links.

And congratulations to Mark on the Pajamas Media gig. Nice.

The appropriate personification for Russia circa 2008 is not an oil-fueled Genghis Khan, threatening to surge once more across Eurasia … no, it is more like a drunk with a knife unable to admit they have terminal liver disease .. a vodka-fueled Genghis Khan’t if you will.
 
Surely a policy of political containment is really all that is needed while nature, rust and liver sclerosis on a Biblical scale do the rest.

Perry de Havilland

Dan recently put a note of ambiguity into our duel of love songs. The vagaries of the human heart, from the sublime to the carnal and all points coincident or appertaining thereto, provides the choicest fodder for poets and singers. Lou Reed, a man of many angles and edges, may have been singing about a real person, an imaginary person, a memory, or even his drug habit, current or recollected. Dan playing a Lou Reed card raises the stakes.

Concede this to me: The predominant perennial theme of love songs is “I love someone who does not love me”. This is pretty much the default love song framework. For one thing, it best allows the singer to address someone referred to only as “you”. This in turn has the advantage for the songwriter that it allows either men or women to sing it, therefore opening up the prospect of more royalties. Plus damn near everybody has lived through it at least once, so it is almost a universal category. And since there is no resolution beyond “getting over it”, it is perfect for singing about.

One of my all time favorites in this categories is the beautiful and strange song “I am Superman”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sickening.

Socialism at work.

The NHS was parasitic on centuries of British work ethic and civic spirit.

That’s gone. Socialism destroyed it. Socialism consumes and destroys cultural capital.

It would happen a lot faster here, since we are a nation of hustlers, and not orderly and public-spirited, deferential and humane, like the British were when they started down this road in 1945.

People respond to incentives. Public property is nobody’s property.

The response to this will be a cry for more funding. More money down the rat hole.

And all the supposedly smart people want the USA to go this way. No way. We should be going in the exact opposite direction.

The two most stagnant sectors of our economy are ones the state is most heavily involved in: health care and education. If both were turned into vigorous, capitalistic, competitive, consumer-responsive industries, something we are good at, America would dominate the world in a generation.

(Hat tip: Instapundit)

Can Obama laugh at himself?
 
Of course not. That would be racist.

Comment on Ann Althouse blog

The slow, slow fading of the color line is one of the most important long-term trends in America’s self-understanding–the inexorable expansion of who gets to be part of the American folk community. Once, Irish Catholics, Italians, and Czechs couldn’t take part in the Jacksonian tradition. Now they’re the heart and soul of it. Hispanics are now headed in that direction.

Walter Russell Mead

RTWT

(Hat tip: James McCormick)

Guess where.

Staggering. These take me back 35 years, to childhood, hearing these songs on the AM radio at night, in the dark: Gems of power pop perfection. Cynical exploitation of teen lust? Of course. Stipulated. But that merely? No, sir. No. Love songs, too, in their fashion. Pop hymns of youth and happiness and a world where consequences don’t exist, but only here and now and maybe forever, but not tomorrow, nor next month or next year. The Raspberries are chewing gum and smiling. They know they are being naughty. What a blast it must have been to be a Raspberry, for a few glorious years. Note that these guys seem NOT to be lip-syncing. Can a rock band possibly be this tight?

(I am seeing and raising Dan’s Death Cab for Cutie post.)

Now, Obama is supposedly some kind of genius, as well as being a messiah-figure who transcends politics, and maybe can even fly and turn sand into rice, like Kim Il-sung used to do. He inspires heart-felt music videos, unlike John McCain. Also, he May Not Be Mocked, much like Louis XIV, Hirohito (in his prime) or Ramses II.

Yet, this super-being just said he will be dealing with foreign leaders, presumably as president, for the next eight to ten years.

Knowing that Presidents are limited to two, four-year terms, is mandatory, basic knowledge that should be, and usually is, second nature to every single reasonably educated American. Everybody knows this. Children know this.

This guy was some kind of Constitutional Law professor at the University of Chicago. He went to Harvard. Now say “ooooh!”

Yet, this kind of thing happens a lot with him, oddly enough.

This is my proposed Quayle Test. Ask yourself: How each time Obama says something stoopid, would the press would have crucified Dan Quayle for it?

Each day, each new gaffe from Obama, imagine Dear Old (supposedly) Dumbsh*t Dan saying it. Then compare what would have happened to him compared to the response Sen. Obama gets from his cheering gallery in the Press.

Obama, and the MSM, are failing this test almost daily.

If I had time to monitor it, I would put a Quayle-O-Meter on the blog.

But I trust we will all be keeping track informally of errors of “J. Danforth Obama”.

The international gun control movement keeps working on gun grabbing with an eye to eventually killing off the 2nd amendment. It’s a King Canute enterprise because the technology for distributed manufacturing is coming and guns are inevitably going to be on the list of things to build right along every other tool. Once every man can be a gunsmith simply by hitting print on a computer, the foolishness of control efforts via law instead of via personal responsibility will have been fully exposed.

T.M. Lutas

John Robb has related, more generalized, thoughts on resilient communities.

I recently had a post about the movie The Dambusters.

For the anniversary of the raid the Brits had a Lancaster bomber fly over the dam the crews trained on in England during the war. Photos here.

It is good to see that at least one of these monsters is still flying.

A little double-standard action from the Reverand.

What a dolt.

One guy left a comment, which I deleted, on my post about Jackson, saying it was sad to see all this fear and hate.

That is funny.

The only fear and hate I am seeing is from a political has-been, Jackson, who has contempt for the people of his own color whom he has pretended to represent all these years, as some kind of unelected permanent spokesman, like some Sub-Saharan President-for-Life.

Jackson is the guy who said he wants to cut Barack’s nuts off, when he was being honest, when he thought no one was listening.

That could be hate, I guess.

I just want Barack to lose the election. I don’t wish him ill, or wish him harm, I merely wish him political defeat. I am probably not going to get my wish.

Jackson is full of fear and hate for Obama for a reason. He is watching his whole ongoing scam go down the drain since someone who has actually won some elections, who has some cross-racial appeal, is now the Leading Black Person in America. And it is about damn time, too. Could that be a reason for Jackson’s hate and fear? Ya think?

I still say “Black” and I mean no disrespect. When I was really little, I can still remember the use of the word Negro, as a respectful improvement on what had come before it. Then at some point, it became “Black&