Sarah Palin with her husband, Todd, and her newborn son, Trig Paxson Van Palin, who is the couple's fifth child.
Yesterday, following this post I made a phone call to the McCain/ Palin Campaign. After getting bounced around a bit I finally spoke with someone with some authority and asked 'does anyone plan to sue over this? I was upset when the fellow answered 'no.' I pressed him and said 'why not?' The answer was profound and I should have thought of it myself: 'This type of smearing only makes them look desperate. If this is the best they've got then I'm feeling very confident about the Senator's choice of Governor Palin. The best thing we can do with this smear is ignore it.'
I got off the phone, calmed down, realized he was right and went to dinner. That being said, I can imagine that if Todd Palin is the man I think he probably is, that this sort of innuendo about his wife and daughter must be infuriating. If I were him, I would want to physically hurt someone. My hope is that he'll never hear about it and go on to enjoy being a Vice President's husband.
Anyway, here's an article detailing the birth of Trig and that yes, he IS Sarah Palin's baby.-Riley
Americans, suspicious that the Obamas have benefited from affirmative action without being properly grateful, and skeptical that Michelle really likes “The Brady Bunch” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” reject the 47-year-old black contender as too uppity and untested.
Instead, they embrace 72-year-old John McCain and 44-year-old Sarah Palin, whose average age is 58, a mere two years older than the average age of the Obama-Biden ticket. Enthusiastic Republicans don’t see the choice of Palin as affirmative action, despite her thin résumé and gaping absence of foreign policy knowledge, because they expect Republicans to put an underqualified “babe,” as Rush Limbaugh calls her, on the ticket. They have a tradition of nominating fun, bantamweight cheerleaders from the West, like the previous Miss Congeniality types Dan Quayle and W., and then letting them learn on the job. So they crash into the globe a few times while they’re learning to drive, what’s the big deal?
Put your claws away, Ms. Dowd. Surely you're not suggesting, based on their respective "experience", that The One, the former street activist and Illinois state house backbencher, is more capable of dealing with global affairs than Governor Palin. Please, tell me that you're not suggesting that... - Roland
On a plane from Denver to Charlotte following the Democrats' convention, I found myself seated behind former National Chairman of the Democratic National Committee Don Fowler and Congressman John Spratt of South Carolina. Their conversation was interesting to say the least:
So you see, it's funny. That New Orleans will get a hurricane. That's funny because it is due to hit when President Bush is scheduled to speak. Isn't that cool? Fowler isn't the only one who thinks so, just ask Michael Moore.
We all know Democrats used and use Katrina as a political football as callously as possible. Here's a candid moment showing some can hardly wait for another one.
And ironically, the biggest criticism of Sarah Palin, John McCain's veep choice, is she has no experience. Funny, coming from the Barack Obama camp.
Following McCain's announcement of Palin - the first female to be put on a GOP ticket for the White House, and only the second in US history - the Obama campaign skipped the niceties and blasted her as the "former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience." She's also a governor of Alaska (my home state), the first woman in that office and the youngest elected in state history. She has an 80-plus percent approval rating. She has turned the state upside down with her reformist zeal and has made enemies of the Republican establishment.
In an audit of durable medical equipment claims (a fraudster favorite), Medicare reportedly told the auditor only to examine the documents submitted by the companies selling the equipment. But auditors are also supposed to randomly select some claims for a deeper dive, to review the underlying medical records and see whether the claim is medically justified
The limited audit found that 7.5% of claims paid by Medicare were inappropriate. But the draft report, from the inspector general of Health and Human Services, found that the actual error rate was closer to 31.5%...
Are you not now convinced that we should throw away our current healthcare system in favor of one with this kind of efficiency? Is there nothing that the Federal Government can't do? - Roland
Even as Barack Obama gave his soaring speech Thursday night, his campaign was playing hardball with its critics. Team Obama has launched an offensive against WGN, the Chicago Tribune's radio station, for interviewing Stanley Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz is a conservative writer who this week forced the University of Illinois to finally open its records on Sen. Obama's association with William Ayers, the unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist.
When a hockey mom named Sarah Palin ran for governor as a Republican outsider in 2006, she took on not only a sitting governor from her own party but also Alaska's Republican establishment -- vowing to clean up a political system that had been rocked by an Federal Bureau of Investigation corruption probe. After handily winning, her popularity in Alaska soared as she went on to sack political appointees with close ties to industry lobbyists...
William Kristol: A spectre is haunting the liberal elites of New York and Washington--the spectre of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism, rising out of the American countryside, free of the taint (fair or unfair) of the Bush administration and the recent Republican Congress, able to invigorate a McCain administration and to govern beyond it.
That spectre has a name--Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old governor of Alaska chosen by John McCain on Friday to be his running mate. There she is: a working woman who's a proud wife and mother; a traditionalist in important matters who's broken through all kinds of barriers; a reformer who's a Republican; a challenger of a corrupt good-old-boy establishment who's a conservative; a successful woman whose life is unapologetically grounded in religious belief; a lady who's a leader.
For grins... her nickname on her high school basketball team was "Sarah Barracuda."
"Can you believe this? I'm actually flying commercial — that's how high gas prices are. I'm at the gate right now. This is really happening — proof gas prices are too high. Tell whoever the next president is, we need to bring gas prices down. ... I can't believe I'm flying commercial. ... Even your boy is affected by gas prices."
Where are all the free speech absolutists when you need them? Over the past month, left-wing partisans and Democratic lawyers have waged a brass-knuckled intimidation campaign against GOP donors, TV and radio stations, and even an investigative journalist because they have all dared to question the radical cult of Barack Obama. A chill wind blows, but where the valiant protectors of political dissent are, nobody knows.
A group of protesters "cast spells" on the Denver Mint in an attempt to levitate it into the air and shake the money out for the homeless. It didn't work.
Jon Meacham writes in Newsweek that Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was “a strong voice for racial justice” and political activist whose “writings on civil-rights and labor issues” had “prompted a McCarthyite denunciation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.” Meacham is suggesting that Davis was the target of false allegations that he was a communist.
While he agrees that Davis was one of Obama’s mentors, Meacham’s handling of the communism angle is about as dishonest as it gets.
Tuesday's release of the papers of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge were sought by the National Review's Stanley Kurtz, who had met a stone wall erected by Obama's UIC friends. UIC temporarily closed the supposedly public archives after Kurtz inquired. Ayers, who has long taught there, may have had a hand in suppressing the documents showing Obama to be a liar.
"During tonight's convention coverage, Keith Olbermann can be heard off-camera angrily demanding "let's wrap him up, alright?" during the appearance of GOP consultant Mike Murphy."
Murphy had one of the Best Quotes Ever in this interview:
"I mean come on, this is, you guys are so in the tank we ought to be filming this on a submarine."
Wow. Never knew MSNBC was so anti-Free Speech. I knew they leaned (fell?) Left but this is low even for them.- Riley
Larry Kudlow: Has a McCain bounce occurred during the Democratic convention? It's not out of the question.
Sen. Hillary Clinton gave a strong speech Tuesday night, at one point invoking a powerful Reaganesque sense of American optimism and confidence. Good for her.
But the early morning line Wednesday didn't show any bump for Obama, despite Hillary's endorsement. Her husband, meanwhile, has virtually endorsed McCain. And he indicated he'd be leaving town following his speech Wednesday night.
Democrats will kneel before the "Temple of Obama" tonight.
As if a Rocky Mountain coronation were not lofty enough, Barack Obama will aim for Mount Olympus when he accepts his party's nomination atop an enormous, Greek-columned stage - built by the same cheesy set team that put together Britney Spears' last tour.
Adding to our new friend Ignatius Reilly’s article, the pomp of a Greek temple is so politically bad on so many levels that it is unclear where to begin. The illusion that the Obama campaign is trying to give is subtle but we can explain because otherwise nobody will get it. They are trying to invoke an image of the historical Greek Agora, in which all the citizens came together to vote on important civic matters.
Never mind that hoplites and slaves did not have the right to vote, and that the Greek form of direct democracy put Socrates to death. In an unintentional final slap to Hillary Clinton supporters, a few historians will note that the right of women to vote was stripped during the Athenian Empire. But let’s save those lessons for a history class. The real problems with Obama’s Greek stage are more obvious.
Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden's speech at the Democratic National Convention was great. As I write, he hasn't given it yet, but these are my favorite parts: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
The current narrative of the Bush Presidency is that it is a failure (believed by 107 of 109 historians surveyed) and that George W. Bush is the worst President in history (believed by 61% of those surveyed historians). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "The president already has the mark of the American people -- he's the worst president we ever had." That's one narrative. I have another.
I recently said that America 'would become France' if a certain bill now in Congress, which would virtually guarantee that every company becomes unionized, ever became law. Deceptively named the Employee Free Choice Act, this bill would in most cases take away an employee's right to a secret ballot in a union election...
Why aren’t the American media investigating the role of British billionaire businessman Nadhmi Auchi in supplying loans to Barack Obama fundraiser Tony Rezko? Some point to media bias, but there is another factor. Working for Auchi, who was born in Iraq, attorneys from London law firm Carter-Ruck have for several months been flooding American and British newspapers and websites with letters demanding removal of material they deem “defamatory” to their client.
In its June 28 edition, British satirical magazine Private Eye explains: “Until Carter-Ruck and Partners and England’s stifling libel laws got to work, the few American journalists not caught up in Obama-mania were turning to the archives of the British press to answer an intriguing question: who is Nadhmi Auchi?”
Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic writer is worried about Iran and Israel. His worry is not the usual one. Although Goldberg is an American Jew so committed to Israel that he served in the IDF, he is worried about what an Israeli attack on Iran would mean for America, specifically for American Jews. "The problem is simple: Muslim extremists often conflate Israel and the Diaspora.
Reports suggests that while Americans generally view the Democratic candidate having had no religion before converting at Reverend Jeremiah Wrights's hands at age 27, Muslims the world over rarely see him as Christian but usually as either Muslim or ex-Muslim
Someone needs to tell Barack Obama that the last time a Democrat won the White House with class warfare was 1948 (Truman vs. Dewey)...When a Democrat talks about cutting taxes for the middle class, he lacks -- what’s the word? -- credibility. The last Democrat who reduced the middle-class tax burden was John F. Kennedy. And in today’s political landscape, he’d be a Republican.
Washington Post explains how Michelle Obama, an executive at the prestigious University of Chicago Medical Center, using Axelrod's PR firm, pushed her Urban Health Initiative for the purpose of steering poor and minorities away from using the more expensive services of the hospital's ER and towards utilizing less expensive local non-urgent care clinics.
Not a bad idea, mind you, and perfectly reasonable, but aren't we supposed to be getting ready to destroy the current system of health care, according to the marxist Obamas, where evil insurance companies and hospitals and doctors and pharmaceuticals have been having to make decisions like this all along, but now when it's Michelle Obama facing the exact same kind of situation in her own hospital, lo and behold, she sides with the "big, evil hospital" and even brings in the big gun Axelrod firm to PR the issue. I think the word hypocrite applies here. - Roland
Some of us have not forgotten 9/11. We haven't forgotten Osama bin Laden. And some us do not believe in Gitmo- we would prefer our enemies dead unless they have information we can use. - Riley
Do not believe that post-invasion intelligence invalidates our justification for using military force against Saddam's Iraq. The truth is the exact opposite. The US was fully justified to use military force against Iraq, even knowing what we know now -- especially knowing what we know now. We should not allow the false story -- almost accepted as fact -- as we head into a Presidential election, to go unchallenged. The False Story
Sure, 60 votes isn't enough to override a presidential veto. But a filibuster-proof majority would put Mr. Reid in almost complete control of the agenda. That holds equally true whether we have a President McCain or a President Obama....Mr. Reid won't necessarily need 60 votes to hold Washington's whip hand. With a contingent of blue-state Republicans (think Maine's Olympia Snowe), Mr. Reid could peel off votes and have an "effective" filibuster with just 57 or 58 seats. That may not be enough to accomplish every last item on his wish list, but close.
That wish list? Take a look at what House Democrats (who aren't burdened with a filibuster) unilaterally passed last year: The biggest tax increase in history; card check, which eliminates secret ballots in union organizing elections; an "energy" bill that lacks drilling; vastly expanded government health insurance; new powers to restrict pharmaceutical prices. Add to this a global warming program, new trade restrictions (certainly no new trade deals) and fewer private options in Medicare.
This explains why Congressional Democrats currently aren't moving spending bills, or energy bills, or anything. They are waiting for next year, when they hope to no longer have to deal with pesky Republicans. This also explains the Senate's paltry judicial confirmations this Congress. They want more vacancies. With a filibuster-proof majority, Democrats could reshape the judiciary under a President Obama, or refuse to confirm any Antonin Scalia-type appointments made by a President McCain.
The relationship Democrats are trying to forge with the faith community at their convention next week took a hit when a popular young evangelical backed out of their Monday night program. Cameron Strang, the 30-something editor of Relevant, a hip magazine about faith and culture, said on his blog that he has changed his mind about delivering the opening night convention prayer because he does not want to be seen as endorsing Sen. Barack Obama.
Jacques Rogge is so bought, so compromised, the president of the IOC doesn’t have the courage to criticize China for telling a decade of lies to land itself these Olympic Games. All the promises made to get these Games — on Tibet, Darfur, pollution, worker safety, freedom of expression, dissident rights — turned out to be phony, perhaps as phony as the Chinese gymnasts’ birthdates Rogge was way too slow to investigate.
Michael Totten has filed a Report from Tbilisi at City Journal.
Senator John McCain may have overstated things a bit when, shortly after the war started, he said, “We are all Georgians now.” But apparently even rank-and-file Russian soldiers view the Georgians and Americans as allies. Likewise, these simple Georgian country women seem to understand who their friends and enemies are. “I am very thankful to the West,” Maya said as her eyes welled up with tears. “They support us so much. We thought we were alone. I am so thankful for the support we have from the United States and from the West. The support is very important for us.”
The citizens of the world who hate America are going to love the latest agitprop released this week by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union. In a document titled "A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in U.S. Public Schools," the left-wing groups seek to paint a horrifying portrait of the nation's classrooms as Abu Ghraib-like torture chambers
Read the first five paragraphs of the NATO statement on the Russian invasion of Georgia and you will find not a hint of who invaded whom. The statement is almost comically evenhanded. "We deplore all loss of life," it declared, as if deploring a bus accident. And, it "expressed its grave concern over the situation in Georgia." Situation, mind you.
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