Is Florida hot in September?

Well, with 60k people around you I suppose it’s bound to be.

60,000?

Didn’t this article say there are 70,000 people in the village? (Did they say village?) So that means only 10,000 people were at home or at work? OK, I’m doing more than showing off my superior math skills. I’m just trying to work my way through, “That’s a shitload of people” and “Is that considered a lot for a rally?” Give me a break here, I’m from Alaska. We do have more than 20 people, but 60,000 really is a lot.

OK, OK, so many probably came from the surrounding area and I’m sure there are some similarities between Alaska and Florida. But those 27 votes…

Florida will be pretty hot in November. I don’t know how much longer I can stand the suspense.

Sarah Palin on the Florida trail

Obama’s Patriot Plan: Jobs for Everyone

Oh you just have to watch this uplifting and inspiring video

…and don’t forget to read the comments!

Obama and lobbyist money: He’d rather you forget

From Allahpundit

Back we go to this tedious subject about which few voters much care but which The One, lacking any compelling evidence that he’ll bring a new type of politics to Washington, loves to invoke as proof of his immaculate Change-iness. Unlike the insiders, you see, he doesn’t take money from federally registered lobbyists or special interests, and from now on neither will the Democratic Party. Except that he does sometimes take money from federally registered lobbyists; and so does the Democratic Party, per its congressional reelection committees; and he’s overflowing with cash from employees of special interests, including employees of those dastardly oil companies; oh, and needless to say, he misleads voters about all of this by choosing his words very, very carefully even while he’s busy tossing out zingers about McCain’s lobbyist “old boys network.” (Get it?)

But if none of those earlier posts penetrated and you’re looking for a concise, all-in-one recap of The One’s cynicism on this point, dive into Matthew Cooper’s piece for Portfolio:

He’d had no problem accepting contributions from registered Washington lobbyists in his previous races for the Illinois statehouse, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate. So now that he’s scoring political points for the ban, what impact has it actually had?…

The campaign accepts money from lobbyists registered in state capitals. It accepts money from partners at law firms that engage in lobbying. It accepts money from the C.E.O.’s, chairs, and officers of corporations, but not their lobbyists. Obama has received more than $627,000 in contributions from employees of Goldman Sachs, including, for example, $2,300 (the maximum contribution allowed) from the likes of managing director George Butcher. But Michael Berman, a registered lobbyist (and a former adviser to Walter Mondale), cannot give money to Obama because his firm, the Duberstein Group, has lobbied on behalf of Goldman Sachs on energy and tax issues. Aren’t such policies a little inconsistent with the ban? “Maybe,” said the senior Obama official. “But it’s important symbolism.”

I recently spoke with a very successful registered Washington lobbyist, a Democrat who asked not to be named in this piece for fear of diminishing his influence with a possible Obama administration. Even though the Obama campaign wouldn’t accept a check from the lobbyist personally, he says, Obama aides asked him to help them raise money in other ways. “They wanted my list,” the lobbyist says, referring to the many donors the lobbyist has solicited for other campaigns. “Since then, they’ve asked if I could organize fundraisers but said that I couldn’t donate.”…

For all the hand-wringing over lobbyists, it’s worth noting that since there are few restrictions on donations to political conventions, the nominating conventions for both candidates were paid for by a slew of direct corporate donors, including AT&T, Qwest, and others. Bill Allison, a senior fellow with the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency in government, notes that the campaigns are “all running around lifting their skirts like there’s a mouse, saying ‘Eek, there’s a lobbyist!’ But they’re raising tons of money” from corporate interests.

He takes money from lobbyists’ spouses too, and even has federally registered lobbyists working for his campaign — but as volunteers, not paid employees, so that’s cool. The worst part is, his stance on this isn’t even the most glaring example of his opportunistic hypocrisy on “reform” issues, so since we’re dredging up old posts to revisit, go ahead and re-read this one too. The guy’s a poseur. Case closed.

A Cryptic Report on a Suspect Survey

Powerline does the heavy lifting for those who prefer to believe conservative Americans are racist.

One of the Democrats’ strategies in this election season is to turn the Presidential campaign into a referendum on the American people: we have to elect Barack Obama President, or else we’re racists.

Many pundits, politicians and celebrities have made this claim explicitly; a new AP/Yahoo News poll advances the same theory in a pseudo-scientific way. Here is how the AP reports the results of its survey:

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks—many calling them “lazy,” “violent” or responsible for their own troubles. …[T]he effects of whites’ racial views are apparent in the polling.

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

Since John McCain, if he wins, will almost certainly win the popular vote by fewer than six points, this survey will be used to cast McCain as an illegitimate President, elected only by virtue of white racism.

The attitude toward the campaign of those who conducted the survey reveals their own bias:

The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush’s unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does the fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.

Others would say that the question requiring investigation is why John McCain is locked in a close race with Barack Obama, when Obama has no discernible qualifications for the office and (as the survey shows) holds views well to the left of the electorate. Occam’s razor would suggest that the fact that 47 percent of respondents describe Obama as “inexperienced” accounts more readily for the tight race than the divinations of “racism” derived from the poll.

You can find what Yahoo News describes as the “full poll results” here. Only they aren’t, in fact, the full results. As made public, the poll results are broken down only by “all respondents” and “whites only.” But the AP reporters had access to data, apparently not publicly available, that break responses down among Republicans, Democrats and independents. Thus, they report:

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word “violent” strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with “boastful,” 29 percent “complaining,” 13 percent “lazy” and 11 percent “irresponsible.” When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama. …

Among white independents, racial stereotyping is not uncommon. For example, while about 20 percent of independent voters called blacks “intelligent” or “smart,” more than one third latched on the adjective “complaining” and 24 percent said blacks were “violent.”

Nearly four in 10 white independents agreed that blacks would be better off if they “try harder.”

Whether those responses do or do not indicate racism, I find it interesting that the AP has data it interprets as apportioning racist attitudes among Republicans, Democrats and independents, but elects not to share it. Here is what the AP says about Republicans:

Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren’t voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for any Democrat for president—white, black or brown.

No data in the survey, as reported, support these statements. It’s interesting that while the AP cites statistics (albeit cryptic ones) to support the imputation of racism to Democrats and independents who don’t support Obama, it offers no such data about Republicans beyond the helpful assertion that “lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too.” I suspect this is because this poll, like all other surveys I have seen on the subject, found that Republicans are less likely to express negative attitudes toward people of other races than Democrats and independents.

None of this, of course, will stop liberals from deriding McCain as a President elected by virtue of racism if he wins the election.

What year are we in, anyway?

In yet another revealing moment for nationalized health care, a highly respected British ethicist said that dementia sufferers should get euthanized in order to preserve resources for healthier people.   Baroness Warnock, described as “Britain’s leading moral philosopher”, said that the government should license people to be “put down” and stop being a drain on society:

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are “wasting people’s lives” because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was “nothing wrong” with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be “licensed to put others down” if they are unable to look after themselves. …

Lady Warnock said: “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives – your family’s lives – and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.

If simply reading the title wasn’t enough to make me want to vomit, the rest of the article did the trick. I was caught in between a surly, “Yeah this was popular elsewhere about 70 years ago” and “Where exactly are all these ‘choices’ leading us?” And sure enough, it didn’t take long before Trig came up, when I spotted mention of him in the comments section.

Trig Palin is the infant son of Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin, the nominee for Vice President of the United States; he has Down’s Syndrome and Palin and her husband knew about it before the rest of us Alaskans even knew she was pregnant. Once the initial shock wore off Trig’s diagnosis became part of the way life sometimes is. We knew she would love him no matter what and for most of us, this is what we really expect of a parent. Little did I know, the day I stood in a special ed classroom as a substitute teacher reading the headline in the Daily Dead Fish Wrapper, that we would come to where we are today: arguing about the worth of a disabled child and wondering how much further all of this would go.

Further? Aren’t we regressing? Now we are talking about killing people “just to clear out a hospital bed”? (I suppose skipping laundry day didn’t save enough money for them.) Am I naive to be surprised that there are people in the world who aren’t sufficiently revolted at the Nazi treatment of those they deemed “useless eaters”? Lady Warnock talks here only about those suffering from senility, but with rising costs and no end in sight for the NHS financial roadblocks, not to mention the disgusting habit some Americans have of trying to be European (read: demand for socialised medicine as well as installation of “European” habits), it seems only a matter of time before some people on this side of the pond start rabble rousing for this protocol as well. So not only would we have socialised medicine should these misguided people get their way, we would be paying for the state to murder our weakest citisens. After all, someone has to pay for the injection and disposal of the bodies. Or maybe they will dump them in a mass grave because it’s cheaper? Then, in about another century or so when people have come to their senses, the graves will be found, much like those found in western Germany in 2006.

So where else will this regression lead us? Will we pick a random age, perhaps based on some formula that determines when senility sets in, and go backwards until our murderous economy starts picking off children? Or are we going to skip all that fuss and just shoot where necessary? One commentator speculates that abortions, once deemed an option in the idea of “choice,” will become mandatory in cases of Down’s Syndrome (or other disabilities). To be honest, as frighteningly futuristic as it sounds, the way some people are carrying on about their “shock” and “revulsion” that Governor Palin allowed this pregnancy to come to term–and Carol Fowler’s repulsive statement, that Palin’s primary qualification to be vice president appears to be she hasn’t had an abortion, the possibility is not so remote as I once would have thought it to be. But I am heartened for the moment by the swift outrage Cathryn Friar noted in her blog, a site that not incidentally was close to the top of Google’s search results. Blogs seem to be doing the job of the so-called “real media” these days.

A few years ago the media were all over Terri Schiavo’s story and although I did see some, erm, legitimate points raised by her parents’ opponents, I did think it probably was wise for me to stay clear of Florida, since my toddler son was very sickly at the time. I did entertain the notion I was exaggerating my fear following disbelief and shock, but look where we are now. If “pro choice” advocates–who in my opinion peddle abortion these days like it’s a birthday ear-piercing, and show such disdain and disgust for the “incorrect” choice–keep pushing this agenda, all their loose ends combined with admiration for anything European could go to places we were previously too humane to even think about.

I don’t want to believe this, really, but it has already been done. The Nazis killed people who were a burden–including old people and disabled children–we know this. China imposes strict reproductive laws in the interest of slowing the population boom. The massive number of adoptions in the US of Chinese babies is partly a result of this situation: women secretly birth babies and then abandon them, often in places the infants are sure to be found and cared for. Who knows how many abortions occur each year, or the rate of infanticide following the births of healthy as well as disabled babies. Countless times I have heard this population control practise defended, its apologists typically citing statistics about the mouths China would have to feed if the controls weren’t in place. What many of these people forget to mention is that the results of the laws aren’t because of some magical Chinese fecundity, but because traditional thinking in China, as in many other countries, values–nay, practically worships–males over females, so much so that women abort fetuses or kill female newborns because they desire the place in society in which they will be honored as the mother of a son. Or simply because they don’t want to be humiliated, mocked, ostrasised or rejected for mothering female children, and they would rather not have to throw themselves down their respective village wells.

The United States has come a long way in this respect, and many feminists have worked hard to ensure girls and women a place in society that didn’t reside in the margins. We’ve seen some mistakes along the way, such as the über critical stance some have taken on housewives who choose to be so. But now I am wondering if this is a precursor to what we are seeing currently: that feminists such as Gloria “only a chromosome” Steinem and those who head NOW have all along been leading us to believe they care about our interests, and will fight to the death to ensure we are, as a class and as half the population, protected from the ugly machinations of a society that already has a tendency to reduce much to numbers…so long as we are worthy of such protection. To be worthy, it seems to be coming apparent, women should not live in certain places, hunt for their own food, be religious, have attended “inferior” universities, have any sort of sympathy for gun ownership, be against abortion in any way, work when there are children at home, or dare give birth to an infant known beforehand to be disabled.

I hardly have the stomach to mention Trig’s name, especially at this particular part of the piece, but progression of this mentality leads me to wonder how the threads might connect their ends to each other as this child grows up. He is born to a loving family and the general public in his land has shown great support for him, his mother and his family. But somewhere in there is something simmering, something I didn’t even know existed, and that is the hate for people like him, those “useless eaters” who will continue to burden the society with their special needs and sometimes weighty medical conditions–people who as they grow older garner less sympathy from some NOWsters than those who have committed heinous, barbaric and horrifically unimaginable crimes and sit on death row, eating up taxpayer money and sympathisers’ imaginations that often even don’t recall the names of their underdog heroes’ victims.

As I write this I am unsure whether Lady Warnock’s sentiments are being weighed with any real seriousness by any people in the United States, some citisens of which are disposed to believe that what governments do in Europe ought to be replicated here. Alaskans are all too familiar with the frustration and aggravation of such standardisation, and employ a beloved and frontier maxim to express how we feel about the matter: “We don’t give a damn how they do it Outside.” Outside (with capital “O”), being anything that is not Alaska, includes Europe as well as Chicago or Miami or Los Angeles, and while we admire some of the best of the continent (Icelandic sweaters, Nutella, Quark), Euro-centric practises most often simply don’t fit, not in Alaska and not in the United States. The worst of them absolutely have no place in our society. I feel certain a lot of Europeans believe this has none in theirs, either. If only that message could get into the heads of those Americans who bow and worship shamelessly at the alter of All that is European. Instances like this probably embarass them as much as they do us.