Note: I’ve updated this post to more accurately reflect the context of Obama’s statement regarding his two daughters.

A rundown, at HotAir, of candidate Barack Obama’s positions and history on abortion, taxes, radical associations, foreign policy judgment, disdain for the heartland, use of the race card, and lack of accomplishments.

Of particular concern, and what I would argue is evidence of the consequences of our country having state-sponsored killing of over 40 million unborn children, since Roe v. Wade, is this video snippet. This candidate, my friends, is someone who would consider his own grandchildren to be a punishment upon his daughters if they had the unfortunate luck to have been conceived while his daughters were still teenagers.

When we don’t view the unborn child as a human being, then it’s not so difficult to see it as a “punishment”.

Unfortunately, I think too many Americans are buying in to the rhetoric that Obama dishes out, with regards to his views on abortion. They consider him to be “pro-choice”, rather than “pro-abortion” (after all, so they say, who in their right mind would call him pro-abortion?). They trump the argument that we cannot legislate morality (to which I argue that virtually every law we have is a legislation of morality). They trump the supposed fact that Obama would sign on to abortion restriction laws were they to include an exception for the life of the mother (to which I wonder why they ignore the FACT that abortion is legal throughout the entire 9 month term of the baby?). They trump the comparison of the thousands of dead, due to the war in Iraq, and ask how moral that decision was (to which I ask, if they want to do some comparisons, how do those thousands compare to the 40+ million abortions since 1973?).

Can anyone be called pro-abortion? What if:

• someone would consider his own grandchildren, still in the womb, to be a punishment on his daughters?
• someone would, as his first act as President, sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would “abolish bans on partial-birth abortion and parental notification laws nationwide while implementing tax-payer funded abortions” (quote via HotAir)?
• someone condemned the Supreme Court decision upholding a ban on partial birth abortions?
• someone considered that caring for an infant born alive, after an abortion, to be an undue burden on the original decision of the doctor, and mother of the child?
• someone stated, on the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, that “Throughout my career, I’ve been a consistent and strong supporter of reproductive justice, and have consistently had a 100% pro-choice rating with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.”?
• someone who, although he claims to be pro-choice, would strip funding from pro-life pregnancy crisis centers?

Yes, I’d call someone like that pro-abortion.

This post examines to characteristics of the two candidates, which are strong negative aspects of their personality. This isn’t meant to be a thing to point out deadly flaws of either candidate. But is a (for me) relatively even handed discussion of two aspects, possibly even related, in which both candidates both have in these two characteristics respectively demonstrated symmetric negative character flaws.

Mr Obama, we have come to understand, at least in his public persona has little or no sense of humor, for example there are clips of their recent public joint comedy appearance. Mr McCain by contrast, came through with comedic timing and sense, does not share this flaw in fact quite the reverse, that he can be quite funny. Inability to tell a joke, for the Meyer-Briggs crowed is probably tell-tale for a distinctive personality type. Now, it may also be that in private, Mr Obama has quite the sense of humor, but that in public he can’t pull it off, but remember, Mr Obama is by all accounts quite the demagogue … which might lead one to discount the notion that it is a public/private matter.

On the flip side, much has been said about Mr McCain’s temper. I have written not just a few times about the virtue of apathy, from the Greek apatheia, or dispassion. Apathy as a virtue is that one is not driven by passions. Anger and rage are strong passions and publicly (or privately) giving way to this, especially when not controlled, is certainly problematic. Mr McCain reportedly has, in private, quite the temper problem. By all accounts, Mr Obama, while not as famously dispassionate as those two NFL apatheia exemplars, Coach Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy, is himself highly controlled.

So, in the virtue vice column, Mr McCain has an excellent sense of humor, Mr Obama does not. Mr McCain has anger/temper issues, Mr Obama is dispassionate. A plus for each and a negative for each.

As an aside: one wonders if the virtues noted above are not unconnected to the vices mentioned. That is, is Mr Obama’s “control” and dispassion linked to his lack of a sense of humor and on the flip side is the emotional lack of same control on the side of Mr McCain also linked to his also having a sense of humor?

Joe "the plumber" Wurzelbacher, for having an honest disagreement with Barack Obama over tax issues, has come under fire from the Left.  Well, "under fire" seems like a rather mild description.  The blog HolyCoast referred to it as a "crucifixion", not in the sense that he’s dying in the press for anyone’s sins, but he is getting himself turned inside-out for the sake of a very calm conversation he had with the Democratic Presidential nominee.  Both men, Joe and Barack, let each other speak, there was no heated arguing at all, and yet the Left can’t seem to bear to have The One(tm) contradicted.

Rather than point to all the individual examples, others have done the research that I’ll point to instead.  They’re good roundups of the incredible personal destruction that lefty blog sites and mainstream media — from the obscure to the prominent — have visited upon someone who simply disagrees with them.

Stop the ACLU notes that the preeminent blog of the Left, Daily Kos, plastered Joe’s personal details for all to see, including home address.  And there are others like Politico.com and the New York Times scrounging around for dirt. 

The Anchoress details reaction from the Right side of the blogosphere.  She also makes a great point.

But here’s the thing: what or who Joe the Plumber is does not matter. What matters is what Barack Obama said to him. The focus on Joe the Plumber – the obsession on him, and the need to somehow discredit him in the eyes of the nation – is meant to distract you from what Barack Obama said, and nothing else.

The lefty blogs and the NY Times (indistinguishable from each other, especially when a Democrat is having trouble) show their true colors.

Update: More links to the smearing of Joe at Redstate.  Add Andrew Sullivan to the list of the "honorable" Left.

Rod Dreher thinks that conservatives who think that McCain won the latest debate are all wrong. He trumps polls which show Obama as the victor and he links to John Podhoretz as support. Podhoretz states,

The general feeling on the right side of the blogosphere is that this was McCain’s best debate and he did himself a lot of good. I think people on the Right were so relieved that the debate finally turned to matters of ideological and partisan moment — abortion, ACORN, Ayers, trade, spending — that, perhaps for the first time in his political career, they graded him on a curve. The problem, in my view, is that the shorthand in which McCain spoke about these matters made them comprehensible only to those of us who are already schooled in them. In almost every case, Obama answered McCain’s shorthand with longhand — with detailed, even long-winded answers that gave the distinct impression he was more in command of the details of these charges than the man who was trying to go after him on them.

We’re not the audience for these debates. Undecided voters are, and undecided voters are, or so studies tell us, often astonishingly ill-informed. You can only bring up new issues if you’re able pithily to explain the context and meaning of them. It is not a rap on McCain to say he’s not good at it; he doesn’t want to bother with the introduction. But in a setting like that, the introduction is what matters, far more than the attack.

I think there’s something inherently wrong with Podhoretz’ reasoning, though.

Consider the… undecided voter. I think there are both informed and ill-informed undecided voters. I know of people who have not decided who they will vote for precisely because they are aware (informed) of both McCain’s and Obama’s positions. They’re frustrated with the choices (or lack thereof) before them, and their frustration manifests itself in the form of indecision.

Now, consider the astonishingly ill-informed undecided voters. If such people are so astonishingly ill-informed, then such people have not put forth the effort to follow the candidates, and their positions. Thus, if such people have not taken the effort to become informed, up to this point in the campaign, then why should we expect that they will park themselves in front of a television and watch a 90 minute debate? Furthermore, if such people can only respond to pithily explained positions, then long-winded answers will be lost on them. Hence, such people will only respond to short campaign ads, the likes of which we will undoubtedly see in the next 2 1/2 weeks.

Short take: McCain finally started hitting on the policy issues that he was missing in the first 2 debates.  Mostly, he took on some of Obama’s mischaracterizations of him.  He should have started this 2 debates ago.  I felt better about his performance, but the quick poll of undecideds on Fox showed movement toward Obama.

Random items:

* The "even Fox News" line from Obama shows how much a blind spot Democrats have for rampant liberal bias in the media.  And if this is his only shot at them, it only proves they are indeed balanced.

* "Joe the Plumber", Joe Wurzelbacher, got about 60 minutes of fame, well more than his allotted 15.  Folks that don’t read the blogs may not have known who he is (though the networks have wanted to make sure you know about that 106-year-old nun who’s voting for Obama), but McCain made sure he got the word out.  Hopefully, they’ll find out that this small business owner is going to get taxed more under Obama, and that "infuriates" him.  Maybe they’ll find the video of Obama telling him he wants to "spread the wealth around" (translation: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need).  Hopefully.

* Obama still insists that 95% of people will get a tax cut, ignoring the fact that many people pay no taxes at all.  And as a conservative pundit noted (forget which one), Bill Clinton campaigned on a middle class tax cut.  Amnesia set in as soon as he sat down in the Oval Office.

* Finally, McCain drove the point home that he wants to give you choice over your healthcare, and not introduce a federal bureaucracy into the mix.  Obama’s plan may sound modest enough, but it’s the foot in the door for an even bigger program.  "This worked, so let’s make it bigger and stronger."  That’s what happens to government programs.  McCain’s plan stops at giving you a credit and letting you spend it with no federal mandate whatsoever.  He avoids the slippery slope. 

And now, the home stretch.

As far as mudslinging goes it is useful to recall that in these latter days of the American Republic, mudslinging is a lost art form. Rarely if ever, unlike the heady days of when the Republic was fresh do opponents in races accuse the other side of corrupting infants or worse … stealing them.

Mudslinging, machine politics, and the rest came of age in the first few elections, notably I think when Mr Arnold almost stole an election in New York by virtue of good organization. Very quickly the high minded concepts of Madison and the rest of the Constitutional convention designers had in mind were thrown aside by the rough and ready actualization of their political structure. Read the rest of this entry

Turns out that Barack Obama’s connection to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers is deeper than everyone originally thought:

By 1995, Barack Obama had known Bill Ayers at least eight years since their shared involvement in the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, if not longer. Bernardine Dohrn, once labeled “the most dangerous woman in America” by none other than J. Edgar Hoover, was also well known as the inspiration for the 1988 movie Running on Empty. Subtle terrorists they were not.

As noted in the New York Times, Obama has tried to minimize his relationship with Ayers, dismissing him as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”

Axelrod also tried to excuse the extent of Obama’s involvement with Ayers, stating,
“Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school. … They’re certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together.”

It’s an obvious fiction pitched by Axelrod, since the Obama children are presently in elementary school, while Ayers’ children are all grown adults, but the Ayers-Obama family connection doesn’t stop at the imaginary connections between the children.

Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers’ wife, has largely escaped recent scrutiny, but that lack of attention doesn’t reduce her role as either a leader — and some may argue, the leader — of the Weathermen. Nor can it mask her ties to both Barack and Michelle Obama. It’s now a family affair.

The whole piece is worth reading as it goes into extensive detail about the Obama-Ayers alliance that has not been previously reported. Media apologists for Senator Obama have tried to downplay the connection but the fact remains that such friendships cast serious doubts on the Senator’s judgement. And Senator Obama is going to have a hard time convincing the public that he didn’t know Bill Ayers wasn’t a terrorist when Ayers has never hidden his past.

Mrs Palin is widely attacked on by those on the left. We’ve heard over and over how Mr Obama’s experience is far more applicable to serving in their respective offices. As well, various criticisms of interviews and tidbits from her past which cast here in a unfriendly light have dominated the press. At the Hugh Hewitt blog, I’d like to highlight two posts from last week which I think might elicit comment. I’ve asked in the past, in regards to her overwhelming negative portrayal in the press how she comes to be our most popular governor (when the Senate from which the other candidates derive their past has a collective approval rate in the low teens).
Read the rest of this entry

No matter who you are, the current credit crunch does affect you, even if you don’t have a penny in the bank or a stock.  Never mind (for now) the domino effect of the credit market seizing up, if you vote, it should affect you.

Item 1:  Rep. Barney Frank has called this current crisis two things that are both flat-out lies; a failure of the free market and the result of Bush administration policies.  Frank should, and likely does, know better, since he’s the chair of the House Committee on Financial Services.  There has been video all over the blogosphere, and linked here as well, that show he and his fellow Democrats denying any problems at all with Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and now he’s trying to solely blame Republicans.  There’s plenty of blame to go around in both parties, but he’s in a unique position, as committee chair, to pronounce the truth of the matter to us.  Instead, he’s politicizing this huge issue for partisan gain.  If you’re from Massachusetts and you vote, this should affect your vote.

Item 1a: Senator Joe Biden said the same thing about it being all about Bush administration policies.  This should affect your vote.

Item 2:  At the foundation of this crisis is an abandonment of free market principles, not the failure of them.  Republicans have (more often) been the keepers of the free market flame.  (That’s not been a constant by any means, but a good generality.)  The Community Reinvestment Act is a Carter-era program to basically force lenders to give home loans to those who would otherwise not qualify, and the default rate of these loans is higher than normal.  That, along with the Gramm-Leach-Billey act which allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to write or buy up these loans in a bigger way, released other banks from this higher-risk paper and continued us down the primrose path.  Again, videos highlighted here showed, one of Obama economic advisors Franklin Raines, who at the time of the video was CEO of Fannie Mae, insisted that home prices would always go up.  Now, there is no doubt in my mind that Wall St. greed fueled this as well, but with a government mandate to write high-risk loans, and a (for all intents and purposes) government agency ready and willing to buy them up, this was a recipe for disaster.

The point is, as honorable and as high-minded the intentions were to try to get more people into their own homes, it set more people up for failure.  You can say that the number of foreclosures wasn’t enough to be a problem, yet here we are, the engine of commerce about to seize up over securities backed by mortgages.  This started when Democrats decided that the free market wasn’t working and instituted policies to, in their eyes, fix things.  While it did get many into homes that might not have otherwise been able to, does it really help us in the long run when Congress has to eventually bail us out to try to avoid a recession or worse?  (And the jury’s still out on if the bailout will really do it, or if it’s just a short-term band-aid.) 

Those who think that the free market failed us then, and are now ironically blaming the free market again, are running for President in November.  This should affect your vote. 

It does affect you.  Or it should.

The Palen-Biden debate is now behind us.  Early polls seem to show that Sarah seems to be the winner, if such a thing can be determined.  On Fox News Channel, Frank Lunz’s focus group (undecideds who voted 50% Bush and 50% Kerry in the last election) overwhemingly thought Palin did a better job, and 3 out of 4 who decided their vote tonight said they’d vote McCain/Palin.

Let’s hear your thoughts.  Did Biden have a better command of the issues?  Did Palen’s informality bring you in or turn you off?  You cry out.

A recent commenter to my Comparing Alaska and New York City; Does size matter? post has taken issue with my extended comparison of infrastructure requirements between Illinois and Alaska, and how such requirements relate to experience in one who governs Alaska vs. in one who is a US senator for the state of Illinois.

Ansley stated,

…There’s not even 700,000 people in Alaska. The mayor of New York City has big fish to fry, my friend….each city has its own unique challenges, but the fact is, the more people you have in an area, the trickier things become.

My first reaction would be to wonder whether or not the critic has been to Alaska and seen, firsthand, how they deal with the logistics of managing such massive sea and air travel, in such extreme locations and weather conditions? Winter conditions that shut down most US airports are simply business as usual in Alaska. While working in Valdez, I was sent home only once, due to weather (and that was because the snowstorm had been dropping snow at the rate of 1 foot per hour for more about 4 hours). It’s not unusual for a typical Valdez snowstorm to drop 4 feet of snow. Once, when landing in Anchorage, the pilot informed us that the current temp was 0 degrees F. He also noted that the current ambient temp in Fairbanks, where the plane was headed, was -43 F. Did you catch that? It’s -43 F, yet they’re going to land and disembark because… it’s business as usual.

Simply put, you don’t manage that type of infrastructure, in that kind of weather, over that expanse of territory, unless you know exactly what you are doing.

But, to address the nonsensical population argument, let’s take a nonsensical look at it in terms of how it supposedly applies to the running of various countries, states, or cities. First, let’s use the following population values, from Wikipedia:

• US = 305,312,000
• China (PRC) = 1,321,851,888
• India = 1,132,446,000
• Russia = 142,008,838
• Canada = 33,390,000
• California = 36,553,215
• Illinois = 12,852,548
• NYC = 8,274,527
• Alaska = 677,000
• Illinois(2) = 642,627

Using the Deepak Chopra / Ansley argument, it appears that running the US is roughly 1/4 the job of running China or India (I’ll give you 4 US presidents for your 1 Chinese premier – and I’ll throw in an extra president for half a dozen Chinese gymnasts). Yet, we see that running the US is about 2 times the job of running Russia (that must explain why Putin has the time to go tiger hunting!), 9 times greater than running Canada (yet another reason for our friends up north to hate us), 8 times greater than California (so former / current actors shouldn’t have a problem running Cal-ee-for-nee-uh?), 24 times greater than Illinois, 37 times that of NYC, and a whopping 451 times more complex than running Alaska!

Case closed? End of story?

Not so fast, census breath.

Isn’t the point here to compare experience levels with regards to being in charge of – as in – managing and running something (i.e., executive experience)? While Palin is actually running Alaska, Senator (did you catch that? – “Senator”) Obama is not running Illinois. In fact, he is only one of two senators, along with around 18 congressmen. Surely we can’t take Illinois’ total population of 12.8 million when comparing Obama’s responsibilities with that of Palin’s, can we? So, let’s do an Obamadjustment to the population of Illinois. First off, since he’s one of two senators, we need to cut the 12.8 million in half, to 6.4 million. And, since he shares responsibility with all those congressmen, let’s half the 6.4 to 3.2 million. Finally, since Obama isn’t really running the state (that’s left for the… ahem, governor), let’s take only, say, 20% of the 3.2 million. Now we’re left with an adjusted population (Illinois(2)) of 642,627 that we could reasonably attribute to Obama’s non-executive responsibilities.

Well, using our adjusted number, we see that running the US is 475 times greater than Obama’s current non-executive role. That puts him behind the governor of Alaska, in terms of population comparisons.

The thing is, Obama isn’t running for VP.