Jonah Goldberg, via Free Republic:

Yep. The day after 9/11, as part of its "get tough" makeover,  the Obama campaign is mocking John McCain for not using a computer, without caring why he doesn't use a computer. From the AP story about the computer illiterate ad:

"Our economy wouldn't survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats," [Obama spokesman Dan] Pfeiffer said. "It's extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn't know how to send an e-mail."

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "extraordinary." The reason he doesn't send email is that he can't use a keyboard because of the relentless beatings he received from the Viet Cong in service to our country. From the Boston Globe (March 4, 2000):

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain's severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain's encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He's an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can't raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

Emphasis is Goldberg's.

So . . . the reason McCain doesn't use e-mail is because the North Vietnamese maimed and tortured him to the point that he physically can't.  And this is somehow worthy of dismissive quotes from Obama spokesmen, and even of an Obama campaign advertisement.

You know, I really want to get past politics-blogging, at least for a little while . . . really, I do.

But apparently Obama is "for the troops"--that is unless one of them happens to stand between Obama and political power.  Then it's classic Chicago machine gutter politics as usual.  Change, folks.  Change.  And Hope, too.

Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia:

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

Emphasis mine.

Now, remember when reading this that this is a liberal, trying to understand why people vote Republican.

It would seem to me what Prof. Haidt is saying is that strongly conservative people actually consider more aspects of a political decision than do strongly liberal people, who focus primarily on issues of harm and of fairness.  This has the ring of truth to me.

One or more of the above will be tried by the Democrats as they become more and more desperate, approaching Election Day:

1:  Democrats will accuse McCain of either having Alzheimer's and/or of taking the Alzheimer's drug Aricept.  Forged documents will be presented to support this smear.  It will get wide, uncritical play in the mainstream media.

2:  Palin's firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan will be pushed ever harder as a "scandal," despite a) her absolute right as Governor to dismiss him at any time, for cause or not; b) the facts of the case, which clearly show that State Trooper Mike Wooten, was an out-of-control officer and should have been terminated rather than protected by Monegan, and c) the Alaska Legislature committee investigating the matter is rife with strident Obama supporters, making any kind of unbiased investigation impossible.  There is no "there" there, but that seldom stops the Democrat/Media complex from ginning up a scandal where none exists.  The only scandal I see is that Palin didn't fire Monegan's ass sooner than she did.

3:  They will find something innocuous in either McCain's or Palin's finances, and whip it up into another "scandal."

4:  They will find some floozy in Alaska who claims to have had sex with Palin's husband Todd.

God only knows what else the Democrats will dredge up or gin up to try to smear McCain/Palin.  But the panic is palpable on the Democrat side now.

Let's stop for a minute and remember what happened.

For years, Islamic extremists raged throughout most of the world, raping, beheading, and terrorizing people from Indonesia to Algeria.  We did nothing.

One of them, Osama bin Laden, declared war on the U.S.  We did nothing.

They set off bombs in the parking garages underneath the World Trade Center in New York.  We did next to nothing.

They brazenly attacked a U.S. warship, the U.S.S. Cole.  We did next to nothing.

They sent men to enroll in pilot schools in the U.S, never planning to finish their studies.  We let them.

They took over four airliners and flew two of them into the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon.  The fourth was reportedly destined for the U.S. Capitol.  Congress was in session that day.  Due to the heroic efforts of ordinary Americans on that fourth airliner, it never made it to Washington, D.C.

The Islamic extremists said that they wanted to recreate the Islamic Caliphate, as it had existed at the time of the Crusades.  They wanted Baghdad to be the capitol.  They ultimately wanted to spread the Caliphate across the entire Earth.

They are the enemies of civilization.  They are barbarians.

We did something.  We attacked their stronghold in Afghanistan, and drove them into the dark recesses of the world.

We then lanced the festering boil on the world that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq--a country which for years thumbed its nose at the United Nations, at sanctions, at negotiations.  A country that had a history of using poison gas on its neighbors--and on its own citizens.

During the course of our lancing that boil, the very Islamic extremists who plotted all of those attacks culminating with the airliner attacks on 9/11/01 said that Iraq was their next battle against us.  Iraq was where they would defeat us, and begin to create their Caliphate. They began taking over that country.  At first, we let them.

Then we opposed them.  We re-remembered how to fight a counter-insurgency.  We started fighting smart, not just fighting strong.

Then we won.

That pretty much brings us up to today.

Or, perhaps not.  Anyway, story at IMAO.

The majority opinion, by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, declared that any law that discriminates on the basis of species will from this point on be constitutionally suspect in California in the same way as laws that discriminate by race or gender, making the state's high court the first in the nation to adopt such a stringent standard. The decision was a bold surprise from a moderately conservative, Republican-dominated court that legal scholars have long dubbed "cautious," and experts said it was likely to influence other courts around the country.

This is a test.  A humor test.  Did you pass?  It's OK to admit you didn't.  After all, it doesn't mention pigs or fish or anything like that.

Direct quote from the O:  "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."

O didn't get the original joke, I guess.  I'm not surprised.  He does seem a pretty humorless fellow, really.  And the polls lately aren't anything he would smile about.

UPDATE:  Obama's campaign says "no, we didn't call Palin a pig.  And we didn't call McCain an old fish.  And we certainly didn't have Palin in mind when we wrote a two-line joke about pigs and smelly fish.  Really.  Would we lie?"  (Not their exact words, but I think they faithfully carry the gist of what they're saying.)

Note to Obama and his campaign:  If you have to explain the joke, chances are it wasn't a good joke in the first place.

Let's see . . . Franklin Roosevelt created the Federal National Mortgage Agency ("Fannie Mae") in 1938 at the very tail end of FDR's "New Deal."

Lyndon Johnson partially privatized the FNMA in 1968, to take it "off the budget."  I say "partially" because although the corporation was divorced from direct public control, it was still implicitly backed by the Federal Treasury, yet FNMA as well as it's partner in white-collar crime, Freddie Mac, were not required to make the same kind of public accounting records that all truly private corporations must do.

FNMA took 70 years to fail, with the result that almost all of the American mortgage industry is practically nationalized.

Nationalized.  Brought under government control.

So, remember the Fannie, when talking about Social Security, or nationalized health care.  The clock is ticking on Social Security.  Can we afford to bail out that New Deal mistake, too?  Can we afford to make another New Deal-class mistake with one-sixth of the nation's economy--health care?

I don't think so.

It isn't privatizing Social Security, or radical reform of Medicare which should be off the table--it's allowing the Federal Government to control even more of the nation's retirement or health care systems than they already do.

It is past time to start phasing out New Deal, command-economy policies and programs, and start implementing 21st-Century, Information-Age, market-oriented policies and programs instead.

I suspect I have somehow managed to become the last person to blog on yesterday's McCain/Palin rally in Lee's Summit, Missouri (my cozy and comfortable home town).

At this point, I suppose I just need to prove that I was there.  But since I always have a mental block against such things, I took no pictures of myself or of Snookums, standing in that enormous snaking line going into the John Knox Village Pavillion.

The rally itself was . . . OK, I guess.  I think I'm not a rally-kind of person.  It was all interesting and everything, but it's not really an experience I need to repeat.

So, on to the pictures and, a first for Medary.com, our very own YouTube videos of the event.  They're crappy, hard-to-watch, kinda hard-to-hear videos, but what the heck, I had to play with my new camera (which, of course, I still owe my eight readers a review of).  So much Internet to surf, so little time . . .

We're in the right place

Taking a picture of Fox 4's standup

A small part of the long line to get in

The Straight Talk Express, departing

Palin's stump speech, in two parts (warning, really bad quality, but hey, it's my first try at YouTubing a public event. I've got a lot of room to improve. Anyway, here it is:

I was going to post McCain's stump speech video here, too, but for some reason the two parts didn't get uploaded to YouTube. Trust me, it's probably for the best.  The video quality is equal in crummyness to the Palin videos. Oh well.  Progress is sometimes measured in learning what NOT to do.

Still, I came home with a McCain yard sign.  (No Palin on it, just McCain.  Grr.)  It isn't up yet, but I've got Snookums to agree to let me put it up.  That's why I married that gal!  (Well no, not really, but it helps, I guess.)

Others who blogged the Lee's Summit rally:

Dee at Conservatism With Heart

 NiceDeb at, er, NiceDeb who, all in all, did a much better job than I did.

Ten days ahead of time, on FreeRepublic.

Here are my Palin posts, before McCain's introduction of her as his running mate on August 29th:

The bold parts are the ones where I'm particularly prescient, I think . . .

Tuesday, August 19:
Palin is, I think, my preference for McCain’s VP.

Whitman would be a bit more of a “hail mary” (forgive the confused but somehow apt analogy) that McCain might have needed if he was already down 5-10 points. But he’s not—he’s even, possibly even a bit ahead of Obama right now.

Palin keeps what’s left of his conservative base intact, but still gives all those PUMA Hillary supporters an affirmative-action reason to look at punching the R chad in November.

So, Palin for me.



Saturday, August 23:
I’m still rooting for Palin . . . Romney isn’t a game-changing choice, in my opinion. Palin really upsets the dynamics of the campaign, I think.

For those who say Palin doesn’t have the experience—I think she’s got more experience than Obama for the job. She’s actually RUN a government, unlike him. Palin on McCain’s ticket just further highlights how little real experience Obama has.

Plus, the vision of ol’ Grins-and-Lies Biden getting nasty and snippy and condescending with Palin at the VP debate would be worth it. And you KNOW in your heart that he wouldn’t be able to avoid doing it, either.

Later on Saturday, Aug. 23:
I think of the relative quality of the R VP candidates vs. the crew that Obama had to choose from, and remark that McCain is in the enviable position of choosing which parts of his campaign to enhance, while Obama had to choose which of his weaknesses he had to shore up. He picked foreign policy (with good reason). Now, judging from the guffaws from the rightie-blogs and the moaning from the leftie-blogs, it’s apparent that Biden really doesn’t give Obama very much.

Personally, I favor the bump and buzz that I think McCain would get from Palin, but Romney, Pawlenty, or some of the other front-runners have definite electoral strengths, too. I just see Palin as a game-changing, strategic pick (take a few percent of the most pissed-off PUMAs and a few more of the soccer/security moms), while the others would be more typical tactical Electoral College picks.

The one highly amusing thing Palin does is highlight just exactly how inexperienced Obama is—I mean, even Palin, with her rather short resume, has more meaningful governmental executive experience than Obama and Biden combined do.

But I’ll be happy with any of a number of potential R VP’s. It’s just that Palin’s potential to drive the D’s into an absolute pretzel of hypocritical contortions pleases me greatly.

They oughta pay me for this . . . assuming of course that I wanted gainful employment!

Zogby says.

Summary:  McCain/Palin favored by somewhere between 47.6% and 51.8% of the population.
Obama/Biden is favored by somewhere between 43.8% and 48.0% of the population.

(Zogby reports 49.7%-45.9% with a 2.1% margin for error.  I just added the margin of error to the two median numbers to show the range--which is actually the correct way of interpreting a poll.)