Two Questions for the Media...

1. Why has every major news organization sent teams of reporters to Arizona (to hunt down and interview Cindy McCain's disinherited older half-siblings from her father's first marriage) and to Alaska (to hunt down and interview any disgruntled divorced in-laws or baby daddy's relatives) but not to Kenya (to interview the Muslim co-parents, half-siblings and co-siblings from Obama's father's numerous polygamist marriages) or to Indonesia (to interview the Muslim family of Obama's stepfather and any Indonesian half-siblings and classmates)?
   
   
2. Why is Obama's 18 year old birth mother (impregnated by an older African exchange student with several polygamist wives stashed away in Kenya) an example of all-American grit, courage and upward mobility, but Bristol Palin is a slut? (For bonus points - identify which one went on government assistance.)

(These are edited versions of questions originally asked by Concerned Democrats for McCain)...

Why The Left Mindlessly Attacks Palin...

Some excerpts from an insightful piece by Jeffrey Bell (titled Why They Hate Her, and subtitled Sarah Palin is a smart missile aimed at the heart of the left):

From the instant of Palin's designation on Friday, August 29, the American left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward truthful reports about John Edwards's affair, bizarre rumors have been reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign directorSteve Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him with preposterous demands.

The most striking thing in purely political terms about this hurricane of elite rage is the built-in likelihood that it will backfire. It's not simply that it is highly capable of generating sympathy for Palin among puzzled undecided voters and of infuriating and motivating a previously placid GOP base, neither of which is in the interest of the Obama-Biden campaign. It also created an opening for Palin herself to look calm, composed, competent, and funny in response.

...

On August 29, in the immediate aftermath of the announcement by the McCain campaign, all that was widely known of the governor of Alaska was that she was married with five children, the last one of whom had been carried to term with Down syndrome, and that she was pro-life. No one knew that her oldest daughter was pregnant. No one knew much about what she had done as governor or in her previous career. No one knew how she had been drawn into politics, or that her sister had had a reckless husband and a contentious divorce. Above all, with the possible exception of John McCain, no one knew that Sarah Palin was both a married mother of five and a brilliant political talent with a chance not just to change the dynamics of the 2008 election but to rise to the top level of American politics, whatever happens this year.

The simple fact of her being a pro-life married mother of five with a thriving political career was--before anything else about her was known--enough for the left and its outliers to target her for destruction. She could not be allowed to contradict symbolically one of the central narratives of the left. How galling it will be to Sarah Palin's many new enemies if she survives this assault and prevails. If she does, her success may be an important moment in the struggle to shape not just America's politics but its culture.

This is as good an explanation as I've seen anywhere for the left's continuing attacks on Palin – attacks that are already backfiring badly. The real losers of this, in the long run, may not be Obama and Biden – but the lamestream media and the kookier leftists. The media is full of stories about people being upset with – the media! The Daily Kos has pulled more stories about Palin in the past week, I think, than in their entire history – they've gone completely berserk, evenly openly promoting the wisdom and morality of blatantly lying to keep Palin from being elected.

I wish I liked popcorn...

Why Ayers Matters...

I was planning to post on this topic, but Neo-Neocon beat me to it. And of course, she did a much better job than I ever could. Her lead:

It is troubling that the MSM has abdicated its investigatory task by being surprisingly uninterested in shining light into some of the more suspicious regions of Barack Obama’s past. And of all those dark corners, the very darkest may be the Obama-Ayers connection.

Why does it matter? Isn’t this just a meaningless game of “gotcha” guilt by association, and a rather tenuous association at that? Can Obama really be blamed for the doings of everyone who’s ever crossed his path?

The official Obama campaign statement about Ayers and the candidate focuses on the charges about Ayers’ terrorist background, the Woods hole connection, and the fact that Ayers is considered a respected scholar on education. It is entirely mum—as Obama has mostly been so far—about their work together on the Annenberg Challenge.

If you care even a whit about this election, you really should go read her whole post – and find out why the Ayers connection matters...

Patio Plants...

Our patio has been a great source of pleasure for Debbie and I this year. We've got something like 40 or 50 plants on it, all potted. Many of them are perched on log segments, both purely for the visual effect and to keep the hungry rabbits from munching them (Debbie won't let me shoot the damned things!).

The photos below were all taken this morning in a binge shoot. It felt good to spend a little time with a hobby; I haven't taken many just-for-fun photos for a while, having been so immersed in my work. All of them are in natural light, with a 100mm macro lens and a polarizer.

There is only one native plant in the entire collection on our patio: a Western Redbud. The other plants you see below include honeysuckle, rosemary, thyme, lantana, guava, polygala, Texas sage, Cape honeysuckle, a bloomin' basil, phlox, garlic, and more...

Don't forget: you can click on any photo to get a larger version...

Enjoy!

12,000 Tossed-Away Flags...

After the Democratic convention in Denver, crews cleaned up the mess – including about 12,000 American flags of many different sizes. They threw them away.

No matter what you think about the American flag, you have to admit that it is a powerful symbol to many – and that for a campaign for President to throw 12,000 flags in the garbage is bound to be interpreted negatively by many people, including even some in the Democratic party. Not everybody sees the American flag as just another piece of cloth. It seems a remarkably stupid move, most charitably interpreted, perhaps, as a stunning tone-deafness to the sensitivities of many patriotic Americans.

Now the Republicans are going to make some hay out of the incident. It seems a worker at Invesco field rescued the flags, and some veterans are going to bring them on-stage at a Republican campaign event in Colorado. Somewhere, someone in the Obama campaign is kicking him or her self right now. Hard.

At the Denver Post, David Harsanyi reports the story, and then wonders what the Democrats were supposed to have done with them. You can almost hear the sneering “They're just some leftover cloth, folks!” Commenters are quick to answer for him – there are, after all, rather a lot of things one might do with some surplus flags. But apparently those things are hard to think of for people of a certain mindset...

Update: A commenter claims that the convention just left the flags at Invesco field, and a Republican-owned company, responsible for cleanup, threw them away. Firstly, even if that were true, the Democratic convention still made the choice to just leave them there, instead of doing something more likely to be interpreted positively. Second, if this claim were true, you'd think it would be in the (many) news stories reporting the incident, and would be the subject of a response from the Obama campaign. It is neither. So until someone can back up this allegation, I'm treating it as business-as-usual smears-and-lies from the fruitcakes and loons on the left. My commenter may well not be one of them, mind you – just a bit more credulous than I am...

Obama's Existential Crisis...

Patrick Poole, writing over at PJM, makes a case that the Obama campaign is facing an existential crisis. From the article:

In his selection of Gov. Palin, McCain has exposed what was perhaps Obama’s greatest weakness, namely how the Obama project has really been a last-ditch attempt by Democrats to extend the miserable life of the New Deal/Great Society Democratic Party — the very bloated big government model they have pushed with the past three candidates: Al Gore, John Kerry, and now Barack Obama. Can anyone really tell the difference between these political triplets?

Make no mistake; Democrats are frantic now that the man behind the curtain has been revealed. Despite their shameless attempt to mask their plans behind identity politics, the Obama campaign has always been about big government liberalism, labor union dinosaurs, and K Street fat-cat lobbyists — Washington politics as usual. America saw this with his vice-presidential pick, Joe Biden.

Read the whole thing over at PJM.

Oh, lordy, I hope he's right...

Some Beautiful Music...

Yes, I know it's religious music. That doesn't stop it from being beautiful!

I am in awe of the skill of these a capella singers, nuns from the St. Elizabeth Monastery in Belorussia...

Why, Oh Why?

Fergus Shanahan, a British journalist writing for The Sun in London, compares Sarah Palin to the current crop of British politicians:

Palin shows us how it's done
From FERGUS SHANAHAN

WHY, why, why can’t WE have a Sarah Palin?

That was the question churning in my mind as I witnessed this astonishing American presidential race.

A week ago few in Britain had heard of Palin.

Today, the moose-huntin’ mom is the most talked-about woman in the world.

And with good reason.

Her sensational performance at the Republican convention may turn out to be the moment the White House slipped from Barack Obama’s grasp.

She was an electrifying mix of passion, energy, optimism and plain speaking. The exact opposite of the slippery, two-faced, depressing bunch of third-raters who parade on our Westminster stage.

My first reaction to this was to wonder: Why, why, why, can't we have the likes of a Fergus Shanahan on the staff of (say) the New York Times? How refreshing that would be compared to the pap that rag feeds us today.

I rather like the rough-and-tumble, no-holds-barred, heavy-on-the-humor style of the British press. There's much to disagree with on the content, but the style I greatly appreciate – most especially the unabashed advocacy of positions, and the lack of pretense about “objectivity” so laughably claimed by our press here. Their newspapers are much more along the lines of our talk radio. Oh, and they make money, too – something you'd think our down-and-nearly-out newspapers would pay attention to...

Quote of the Day...

Ilan Samson, talking about why he's in San Diego:

We are here to stay, because this is the place where people do things. They're enthusiastic, as opposed to Europe where they cleverly talk about things.

Taken from this article in Voice of San Diego. Samson is an Israeli who has lived in Europe for years, and recently moved here to pursue the development of a new kind of calculator.

What initially piqued my interest in this interview was the calculator (called “Qama”). What makes it different than an ordinary calculator is that it won't provide the answer until you give it a reasonable estimate of what the answer should be. This is exactly the aspect of using a slide rule for calculating that pushed me into becoming proficient with arithmetic and algebra (especially), along with some other specific areas of mathematics. With a slide rule, you get the digits of the answer, but not the magnitude. For example, you might get the result ‘535’ – but you don't know whether that's 5.35, 53500, or 0.000535. To get the complete answer, you must estimate the correct answer (within an order of magnitude), and then use the slide rule to give you the digits. By using the magnitude from your estimate and the digits from the slide rule, you get the right answer – and only by doing that.

Which sounds exactly like what Qama is doing. I think Samson is onto something here...

Palin Rumors...

Charles Martin has a running list, updated as needed, of all the nasty-but-debunked rumors being spread about Sarah Palin since the day she was announced for the Republican VP slot. As I write this, he's listing 46 of them...

Huh?

At first this article caught my interest because the main subject was interesting: an archaeological find of humans in Switzerland some 5,000 years ago. But as I read the lead, I did a double-take:

Some 5,000 years ago, on a day with weather much like today's, a prehistoric person tread high up in what is now the Swiss Alps, wearing goat leather pants, leather shoes and armed with a bow and arrows.

The unremarkable journey through the Schnidejoch pass, a lofty trail 2,756 metres (9,000 feet) above sea level, has been a boon to scientists. But it would never have emerged if climate change were not melting the nearby glacier.

The emphasis above is mine. The rest of the article make clear the author's believe that the glaciers are melting today because of anthropomorphic (i.e., human-caused) global warming (AGW).

So...in the space of three sentences – the first three, no less – and with no apparent intended irony or sarcasm, this article (1) states plainly that 5,000 years ago the climate under today's glacier was warm, and (2) introduces the notion that anthropomorphic global warming is causing the glacier to melt, thus revealing our frozen Swiss hunter.

Presumably not even the most fanatic believer in AGW believes that the warm climate 5,000 years ago was caused by human activity. What amazes me is their assured acceptance of the notion that the many warm cycles our planet has experienced in the past are all different (and ok, somehow) than the current warming (assuming, even, that such warming is really occurring – something I am none too sure about). In other words, even though Earth has had hundreds of warm periods, dozens of them within the span of human history, AGW believers are certain that if another warming period occurs, it could only be because of (bad!) human activity.

And this set of assumptions is pervasive enough to make it into completely unrelated articles like this one.

I heard an interesting theory at work a few days ago. My coworker proposed this notion: that mankind has some sort of deep need to always be facing some upcoming disaster. Therefore if no real disaster is readily at hand, mankind will make one up through some sort of organic community process.

As I think back over my lifetime, it's not hard to plug in the looming disaster over each period of my life – the Soviets and their super-technology when I was a kid (think Sputnik), then the Communists and their quest for world domination. Oh, and let's not forget nuclear winter, over-population, the year 2000, and on and on. Yup, there always seems to have been one overriding looming disaster, except on a few occasions when we had two of them at once. Makes me wonder if my coworker might be right...

Your Morning Ponder...

Fascinating post over at Captain Capitalism, wherein the Captain makes a connection between lefties and terrorists. Here's a sample:

"Hey, Rahib. Do you want to go and get a degree in engineering, go to mosque, raise some kids and maybe some goats?

or...

"Go to the Western Infidel stronghold of London and against insurmountable odds wage an underground, underdog war in an epic and never-ending galactic fight against the evil, villainous forces of Capitalism, Christianity, America and Western Culture in a desperate attempt to convert the people of the world to Islam and destroy those that won't, while you guarantee yourself a position in heaven along with 72 brown-eyed virgins even though you have not the equipment to enjoy them!"

Again, what seems more heroic and romantic and would play to the psychoses of a brainwashed Islamic ego-manic?

Grab a cup of coffee and take 10 minutes or so to absorb the whole thing. There's lots of Saturday-morning brain-starterness in there...