Brilliant

I mean that.

This Has To Be Exaggeration, Right?

Rock band Yes to tour with replacement singer

The classic rock band Yes, which was forced to cancel their 40th anniversary tour this year due to the illness of its lead singer, has decided to relaunch the tour with an "understudy" -- a Yes tribute band singer.

Benoit David, who sings in several Yes tribute bands in Montreal, will replace Jon Anderson on the "In the Present" tour, which kicks of Nov. 4 in Ontario, Canada, according to bassist Chris Squire.

There are "several" Yes tribute bands in Montreal alone? I know it gets cold up there, but there has to be something else to do.

Eugenics Alive And Well In Canada

You remember eugenics don't you? You know, the idea that produced such 20th century marvels as the forced sterilization of the handicapped or the Holocaust. Well, we should all be pleased to know it has found a happy home in our neighbors to the north:

Andrew Malcolm finds a senior Canadia physician -- Dr. Andre Lalonde, executive vice president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Ottawa -- raising concerns over the looming threat raised by Governor Palin: "[S]uch a prominent public role model as the governor of Alaska and potential vice president of the United States completing a Down syndrome pregnancy may prompt other women to make the same decision against abortion because of that genetic abnormality. And thereby reduce the number of abortions."

Ah, such a genteel form of barbarism.

Remember, No One Has Ever Gone After Palin Unfairly...

...the MSM and Obama said so, so it has to be true:

South Carolina's Democratic Party chairwoman said Wednesday that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's top qualification seems to be not having had an abortion.

Classy as always.

Barack Obama: Serial Plagiarist

Obama's choice of Joe Biden makes more sense by the hour.

What A Wuss

My God, when he isn't trying to hind behind his race, the media, or Hillary Clinton's skirt...make that a pantsuit, all Obama does is whine:

Sen. Barack Obama on Wednesday accused Sen. John McCain's campaign of engaging in "lies" and "swift boat politics" in regard to his comment about "lipstick on a pig."

"Spare me the phony outrage. Spare me the phony talk about change," Obama said at the start of an education event in Norfolk, Virginia.

I didn't blog about the original complaint from the McCain people because I thought it was slightly stupid. But, leave it to Obama to turn it into something that paints Obama in a negative light.

Every time he cries and stamps his little feet I feel like screaming "If you can't stand the heat get out of the goddam kitchen." I'm getting sick of being treated to the Obama amateur hour week in and week out. I'm especially getting sick of watching it and having the MSM tell me I'm watching something special. Oh, its "special" all right, but not in the way they mean.

Responding to Obama's comments, McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, "Barack Obama can't campaign with schoolyard insults and then try to claim outrage at the tone of the campaign.

"His talk of new politics is as empty as his campaign trail promises, and his record of bucking his party and reaching across the aisle simply doesn't exist."

Obama's talk about "new politics" as opposed to "swift boat politics" rings particularly hollow given he is setting up his very own swift boat group to smear Palin:

Earlier Wednesday, Obama's campaign announced it was launching "Alaska Mythbusters," a group of Alaskans that the campaign says will "set the record straight" about Palin.

My God, Obama cannot release a single press release without contradicting himself.

What a joke.

The MSM: Getting Dumber & Dumber By The Minute

Yep, this time its Michael Kinsley who actually attempts to get people to take the following premise seriously:

Sarah Palin thinks she is a better American than you because she comes from a small town, and a superior human being because she isn’t a journalist and never lived in Washington and likes to watch her kids play hockey.

Yes, that's right. Being akin to the majority of Americans who A) Don't live in one of the 20 biggest metropolitan areas, B) Have never lived in Washington, DC, C) Are not journalists, and D) Take pride in the accomplishments of their children, all of that makes you "an elitist."

Kinsley's opening sentence has to be the dumbest thing I've read all year, and I'm the guy who read a paper where a student said Nietzsche caught syphilis because he was working as a prostitute. (Talk about an "eternal recurrence!"!)

QandO picks up the story, because Kinsley's piece doesn't get any better. Kinsley sneers:

Of the 50 states, Alaska ranks No. 1 in taxes per resident and No. 1 in spending per resident. Its tax burden per resident is 21/2 times the national average; its spending, more than double. The trick is that Alaska’s government spends money on its own citizens and taxes the rest of us to pay for it. Although Palin, like McCain, talks about liberating ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, there is no evidence that being dependent on Alaskan oil would be any more pleasant to the pocketbook.

If you listen closely, you can hear the muted shuffle of the don’t-judge crowd sneaking over to my side of the room.

Contrary to what Kinsley calls "reality," Alaska is not No.1 in per capita taxes, nor in the top ten. Heck it’s not even in the 25 states for that category. In fact, Alaska’s residents are the least taxed in the nation:

Since 1990, Alaska’s state and local tax burden has consistently been the nation’s lowest. Estimated now at 6.4% of income, Alaska’s state/local tax burden is well below the national average of 9.7%. Alaskans pay $2,871 per capita in state and local taxes.

Before the Trans-Alaska pipeline was finished in1977, taxpayers in Alaska bore the second-highest tax burden in the country. By 1980, with oil tax revenue a certified bonanza, Alaska repealed its personal income tax and started sending out checks instead. The tax burden plummeted, and now Alaskans are the least taxed.

Wow. You have to admire someone who can bravely make a claim that is not just demonstrably false at the present time, but going back every year for the last 18 years. That takes talent.

It takes something, that's for sure.

Would someone like to tell the MSM to stop digging?

Oh My God

Evidently this is not a put on. They're actually serious: Send us your dreams about the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

I rarely remember my dreams, but for the past week, GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin has been haunting me. Night after night, she appears in my dreams, always as a scolding, ominous figure.

When I mentioned my Palin dreams to Slate colleagues, they volunteered their own. One Obama-supporting colleague dreamed she had urged her young son to kill Palin with a string bean. Another dreamed she was at a fashion show and Palin served her crème fraîche on little scooped corn chips. A third says, "In the Sarah Palin dream I keep having, she has superhuman powers but is not really a person at all. In fact, she is more like the weather with glasses and an up-do, pushing clouds around and pitching lightning bolts."

I suspect we are not unusual. Palin has gripped the American imagination in a way that seems designed to burrow into our dream lives. Palin's supermom abilities provoke envy and anxiety in women, especially other working mothers. Her instant celebrity and dazzling speech have panicked Obama supporters who thought they had the election in the bag. And then there's her sex appeal. A couple of conservative men I know have mentioned that they've been having sexual fantasies about the Alaska governor. I'm sure they're not alone.

Oh...and how dare you suggest that Sarah Palin is being treated differently by the media because of her gender.

New Democratic Meme: Palin Can't Be VP Because She Is Believing Christian

Or at least not the right kind of Christian.

It's a heartwarming vision of America:

"What's that, little Emma, you'd like to grow up to be President one day? Oh, I'm so sorry, but you can't be President! You are not a Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal, or liberal Catholic. No. You are only good for breeding and cooking...or being a tramp. Maybe all three."

Are Democrats really that confused about why they are going to lose this election?

UPDATE:

Here's First Things' take:

At Salon.com, Juan Cole asks what the differences between Christian fundamentalists, like Sarah Palin, and Islamic fundamentalists are? Lipstick is the answer he finds. That she’s not wearing a burka or having her daughter flogged and stoned for adultery might be another.

Laugh Out Loud Moment Of The Day

From Reuters: Poll shows big shift to McCain among white women

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has gained huge support among white women since naming Sarah Palin as his running mate and now leads Democrat Barack Obama among those voters, according to a survey published on Tuesday.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll found that much of McCain's surge in the polls since the Republican National Convention is attributable to the shift in support among white women.

The race for the White House is now a virtual tie, with Obama at 47 percent support of registered voters and McCain at 46 percent, the poll found.

Before the Democratic National Convention in late August, Obama held an 8 percentage point lead among white women voters, 50 percent to 42 percent, but after the Republican convention in early September, McCain was ahead by 12 points among white women, 53 percent to 41 percent, the poll found.

Asked about the findings during a briefing on Monday before the poll was published, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told a Washington Post reporter, "Well, your poll is wrong."

"Yeah, you and your fancy statistical sampling!"

Anyway....could the poll be wrong? Sure it could. It's just nice to know the Obama camp is using polling data the way a drunk uses a lamppost.

If this is the first evidence of a backlash against the vicious and unhinged attacks against Sarah Palin could Camp Obama even learn from it? I tend to doubt it. Their modus operandi has been to scream racism whenever they get pushed, but this time they are the ones doing the pushing... and this time they may be pushing themselves right off a cliff.

Maybe This Is All An Honest Mistake...

...and Obama is actually Canadian:



(H/T to QandO again.)

Another MSM Palin Smear

This time from the Washington Post:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a "per diem" allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.

The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.

QandO has the truth of the matter:

Ah, here’s the scandal:

Asked Monday about the official policy on charging for children’s travel expenses, Garnero said: "We cover the expenses of anyone who’s conducting state business. I can’t imagine kids could be doing that."

Uh, well maybe not:

Leighow noted that under state policy, all of the governor’s children are entitled to per diem expenses, even her infant son. "The first family declined the per diem [for] the children," Leighow said. "The amount that they had declined was $4,461, as of August 5."

State policy you say. Huh.

But she’s been abusing state policy, right?

Gov. Palin has spent far less on her personal travel than her predecessor: $93,000 on airfare in 2007, compared with $463,000 spent the year before by her predecessor, Frank Murkowski. He traveled often in an executive jet that Palin called an extravagance during her campaign. She sold it after she was sworn into office.

Good Lord. If this is all you get when you send the foreign legion of the press corp into the wilds of Alaska you can hardly claim to be getting "bang for your buck."

Will they ever tire of embarrassing themselves this year?

This concerted effort at gaining a political "death of a thousand cuts" is getting a little boring.

Truth

One of the worst things about attempting to have a rational discussion with an Obama zealot is the basic stupidity of attempting it in the first place. (For an example of my stupidity see this.) Unfortunately, I'm a committed pragmatist so I try to believe that reality can knock people back into the light...so to speak.

Well, in that vein, this exchange should be enough to get people who claim to be moderate to rethink the myth that Obama has "reached across the aisle in a spirit of non-partisanship."

Fox News' Chris Wallace: Now, David, McCain and Palin do have records of going up against their own parties. When has Barack Obama ever gone up against the Democratic Party in the U.S. Senate?

Obama Senior Strategist David Axelrod: ... One of the first things that Senator Obama did when he came to the U.S. Senate was push for the most far-reaching ethics reforms that we've seen since Watergate. That didn't please people on either side of the aisle, and he has done that consistently in his career. He's reached across party lines to find consensus and he's taken on his own party on issues like, like ethics reform.

You know, what was interesting about these attacks about bipartisanship and so on is that people like Dick Lugar, the very respected Republican senator from Indiana, spoke out and said, These are just partisan attacks. I've worked with Barack Obama.' They worked together on arms control. Senator Coburn in Oklahoma worked together with him on budget issues, like putting the budget on Google so we can see how our money is being spent, putting caps on the contracts around Katrina rebuilding. Senator Obama has a strong record of working across party lines to produce progress for people.

Wallace: But David, because you guys always talk about ethics legislation and the nuclear non-proliferation deal with Dick Lugar, I went back and looked -- both of those measures passed by unanimous consent. They were so accepted by the Senate that there was not even a vote. In fact, ethics legislation was one of the campaign promises. These were not -- if I may, if I may. These were not areas where Barack Obama went up against the leadership of his own party nearly in the way that John McCain did on campaign finance reform, on limiting interrogation of terror detainees, on immigration reform. He did not go up against his own party on either of those issues.

All I can recommend is if you want to back Obama because you like his toe-the-line liberalism than own up to it. That at least has the benefit of being honest.

Unfortunately, Obama's entire campaign has largely been an effort of smoke and mirrors.

Democrats Falling Behind In The Money Race

WLS over at Patterico has been predicting this for a couple of months, and now the NYT is confirming all is not well in hopey-changey land:

Pushing a fund-raiser later this month, a finance staff member sent a sharply worded note last week to Illinois members of its national finance committee, calling their recent efforts “extremely anemic.”

The signs of concern have become evident in recent weeks as early fund-raising totals have suggested that Mr. Obama’s decision to bypass public financing may not necessarily afford him the commanding financing advantage over Senator John McCain that many had originally predicted.

Meanwhile, Obama campaign officials had calculated that with its vaunted fund-raising machine, driven by both small contributors over the Internet and a powerful high-dollar donor network, it made more sense to forgo public financing so they could raise and spend unlimited sums.

But the campaign is struggling to meet ambitious fund-raising goals it set for the campaign and the party. It collected in June and July far less from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s donors than originally projected. Moreover, Mr. McCain, unlike Mr. Obama, will have the luxury of concentrating almost entirely on campaigning instead of raising money, as Mr. Obama must do.

It is most fitting that Obama's first major flip-flop is coming back to bite him so hard. Were I prone to nostalgic fits of 1960's speak I might even call it "karma."

Obama's Target Audience: People Who Need To Get Out More

Heh.

“You don’t have to be 72 to have experience,” he said, referring to the age of Mr. McCain. “It’s the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. This 21st century man has an aura of hope wrapped around him.”

*snicker*

Great verbage daddy-o.