Apple mocks Microsoft’s approach to defending Vista through advertising.

0:30 video

An unidentified comedy team in Britain tests the memories and attention of some ordinary passersby.

2:05 video

Chicago developer Tony Rezko provided the bridge that made it possible for Barack Obama to buy his $1.65 million dream house by arranging for the price to be lowered by splitting the acreage and having his wife pay full price ($625,000) for a 9090 sq. ft. portion of the side yard accessible only through the main property now designated a “development lot.” Obama got $300,000 off the asking price for the rest.

Original story

Well, what do you know? It seems the side yard parcel purchased by Mrs. Rezko wouldn’t appraise, and the bank appraiser who rejected a $625,000 valuation was fired and a new reappraisal mysteriously substituted for his estimate of no more than $500,000.

They call that bank fraud.

The Washington Times has the story.

Sarah Palin behaves like a good sport while the SNL crowd pack in as many anti-Palin, anti-McCain jibes as they possibly can.

Opening skit: Tina Fey impersonates Palin. Palin watches skit and meets Alec Baldwin.
5:14 video

Sarah Palin good-humoredly plays along with rap song bashing her.
3:03 video

The Wall Street Journal responds to the latest attempt by the left to pin the credit crisis on a lack of regulation.

In an attempt to fill out Mr. Obama’s talking points, the press corps has now fingered a 2004 change in SEC net capital rules. In fact, then-SEC Chairman William Donaldson’s reform was anything but deregulation. A regulatory failure, yes, and a cautionary tale for those who think new regulation will solve everything.

The 2004 change won unanimous approval from SEC commissioners and Democrat Annette Nazareth, who ran the market regulation division at the time. Rather than deregulation, it was a breathtaking regulatory leap for an agency that had traditionally focused on protecting individual investors. Under the new program, the SEC would not simply monitor broker-dealers to ensure that client accounts were safe. The commission staff would collect new data from the parent companies of brokerages and require new monthly and quarterly reports. Firms were supposed to provide detailed explanations of internal risk models.

Before approving the rule at an April 2004 meeting, several commissioners wondered if the SEC staff was up to the task. Apparently not. It’s clear from a recording of that meeting that the commission expected investment banks to employ more debt. This was no unintended consequence but the inevitable result of adopting the so-called Basel II banking standards. The SEC was supposed to apply these standards created for commercial banks to investment banks, but with additional measures to ensure liquidity.

Was Basel II a libertarian plot cooked up at the Cato Institute? Not quite. It was the product of years of effort by the world’s major central banks, intended to avoid crises such as the U.S. savings and loan disaster. Basel embraced the theory that a common set of global banking standards and more intensive study of the risks of particular assets would yield both more efficient use of capital and a more stable financial system.

We now know it did not create stable investment banks, but the SEC could be forgiven for thinking that if it was good enough for the world’s central bankers, it was good enough for the commission. As Ms. Nazareth said of the SEC’s new approach, “It’s largely modeled after Federal Reserve-type supervision and I can’t imagine anyone would question that kind of approach.” Few did. Swiss banking regulators are only now raising mandatory capital ratios above those permitted under Basel II.

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Columbia Business School Professor Charles W. Calomiris joins in the demolition of the same contention.

As for the evils of deregulation, exactly which measures are they referring to? Financial deregulation for the past three decades consisted of the removal of deposit interest-rate ceilings, the relaxation of branching powers, and allowing commercial banks to enter underwriting and insurance and other financial activities. Wasn’t the ability for commercial and investment banks to merge (the result of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed part of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act) a major stabilizer to the financial system this past year? Indeed, it allowed Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch to be acquired by J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, and allowed Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to convert to bank holding companies to help shore up their positions during the mid-September bear runs on their stocks.

Even more to the point, subprime lending, securitization and dealing in swaps were all activities that banks and other financial institutions have had the ability to engage in all along. There is no connection between any of these and deregulation. On the contrary, it was the ever-growing Basel Committee rules for measuring bank risk and allocating capital to absorb that risk (just try reading the Basel standards if you don’t believe me) that failed miserably. The Basel rules outsourced the measurement of risk to ratings agencies or to the modelers within the banks themselves. Incentives were not properly aligned, as those that measured risk profited from underestimating it and earned large fees for doing so.

That ineffectual, Rube Goldberg apparatus was, of course, the direct result of the politicization of prudential regulation by the Basel Committee, which was itself the direct consequence of pursuing “international coordination” among countries, which produced rules that work politically but not economically. International cooperation, in case you haven’t heard, is exactly what the French and the Germans now say was missing in the past few years.

So why blame deregulation and small government? The social psychologist Gustav Jahoda says that unreasonable beliefs often arise in circumstances where people lack control and need to believe in something to get them through a highly stressful situation. And a fellow named Machiavelli might help us to understand a different reason for simplistic explanations.

Sam Schulman, in the Weekly Standard, contemplates the crucial role of class solidarity in this year’s election, concluding that Sarah Palin (the Admirable Crichton of 2008), not Bill Ayers, is the real revolutionary.

A must read.

Mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated—but why? He hasn’t, like Chuck Colson, repented, or paid his debt to society by serving a prison term. He doesn’t even enjoy the prestige of a Clinton presidential pardon. Susan Rosenberg, a fellow Weatherman for whom Mrs. Ayers did go to jail rather than implicate in the execution murders of several cops, enjoys that distinction. What makes the Ayerses respectable is purely a matter of upper-middle-class solidarity. You can see the ranks close around them in the texture of Richard Stern’s elegant prose. Stern, a novelist and a long-serving University of Chicago English professor, reassures us:

I’ve been to three or four small dinner parties with Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, once hailed as the Weather-men’s Dolores Ibárruri (“La Pasionaria”), a fiery, beautiful muse. .  .  . Dohrn is still attractive, while Ayers maintains an adolescent fizzle in his sexagenarian bones.

Carefully, Stern engages with the glamorous couple on equal terms, before judging them:

At dinner, thirty-eight years later, Ayers and Dohrn did not seem to hold [my criticism of the 1970 University of Chicago student uprising] against me, and I didn’t hold their fiery and criminally violent behavior against them. As in Chekhov’s wonderful story “Old Age,” time had planed down the sharp edges and brought one-time antagonists into each others’ arms.

As the Ayerses’ social equal, Stern can estimate them fairly.

As far as I know, Ayers and Dohrn are loyal to the selves which led both of them to jail (though not for long), but they were busy doing other things, useful things, Ayers as educator, Dohrn as a legal counselor. They’d raised the child of a Weatherman who’d been jailed, they were taking care of Bernardine’s ill mother, they were doing many things educated community activists were doing.

What the Ayerses now teach, think, and do hardly matters as long as they observe good form, the form of “educated community activists.” Stern wants us to hear a mellow Chekhovian tone in their lives (and his prose). Perhaps, but in his moral reasoning I hear Oscar Wilde’s Cecily Cardew, in The Importance of Being Earnest, observing that the Ayerses “have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.”

Read the whole thing.

For at least three years, Verum Serum reports. Michael Klonsky was there, too.

Henry G. Manne predicts a long period of the expansion of statism, economic stagnation, and freedom’s retreat.

The political direction of the country is now determined for a long time to come, and it is inevitably leftward. Politicians would never resist a popular but massive demand for more government regulation (even the few with enough brainpower to recognize what is going on). The business community has never been a strong supporter of free market capitalism, and it certainly cannot be counted on to change its stance this time around. The media, the various leftist trend-setting elites and university faculties have been waiting a long time for an opportunity just like this, and we can be sure that they won’t squander it. The shrillness of their attacks on free markets will reach new heights of righteous indignation and assumed moral and intellectual superiority.

No policy issue based on private property, low taxes, small government or free trade will escape the charge that any unregulated free market will lead to disastrous excesses just as happened with the great financial crisis of 2008. This will be true for such soon to be rebuffed ideas as tuition vouchers for private schools, private health care, lower estate taxes, deregulation in its many forms, reduced use of eminent domain, tort liability restraint and free trade.

We can anticipate a new reign of mercantilism, as the protectionists among us wield this strong new weapon against globalization and open markets. And all of this is true in large degree regardless of who wins the forthcoming election.

If Sarbanes-Oxley was any indication of the kind of legislation that results from crisis, then we can be sure that even more ham-handed regulation of all kinds will be the main product of the next Congress. Henry Waxman’s grandstanding this past week about bankers’ greed has been merely the warm-up for what is to follow.

Bankers eager for federal help now will find themselves regulated not far short of total federal control of their business behavior. Banks won’t be permanently nationalized, but what we will get will differ from that result semantically more than factually. Derivatives, for all their promise of alleviating panics and distributing risk, will not now be allowed to evolve into the brave new system once predicted for them. Accounting rules will become even more convoluted as we continue to ask for more information out of double-entry bookkeeping than it can ever deliver.

Still, there is a glimmer of hope left to those who detest this seemingly inexorable slide into socialism or its first cousin, the super-regulatory state. That glimmer comes from the ghosts of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who still haunt the halls of the left. And in spite of all the claims made that this debacle marks the demise of free market philosophy, it won’t go away so easily.

Read the whole thing.

Eugéne Delacroix (1798-1863), (detail) Atilla suivi de ses hordes, foule aux pieds l’Italie et les arts (Attila followed by his Horde, Trampling under Foot Italy and the Arts), Bibliothèque, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 1843-47

Bruce Bartlett, at the Cato Journal, describes how the same policies pursued by today’s democrat party produced the downfall of Rome.

In the end, there was no money left to pay the army, build forts or ships, or protect the frontier. The barbarian invasions, which were the final blow to the Roman state in the fifth century, were simply the culmination of three centuries of deterioration in the fiscal capacity of the state to defend itself. Indeed, many Romans welcomed the barbarians as saviors from the onerous tax burden. [15]

Although the fall of Rome appears as a cataclysmic event in history, for the bulk of Roman citizens it had little impact on their way of life. As Henri Pirenne (1939: 33-62) has pointed out, once the invaders effectively had displaced the Roman government they settled into governing themselves. At this point, they no longer had any incentive to pillage, but rather sought to provide peace and stability in the areas they controlled. After all, the wealthier their subjects the greater their taxpaying capacity.

In conclusion, the fall of Rome was fundamentally due to economic deterioration resulting from excessive taxation, inflation, and over-regulation. Higher and higher taxes failed to raise additional revenues because wealthier taxpayers could evade such taxes while the middle class—and its taxpaying capacity—were exterminated. Although the final demise of the Roman Empire in the West (its Eastern half continued on as the Byzantine Empire) was an event of great historical importance, for most Romans it was a relief.

Read the whole thing.

The mainstream media treated Joe the Plumber having a tax lien as a matter of national interest. But, as Jim Lindgren points out at Volokh Conspiracy, obvious ethics violations by a certain former Illinois state legislator are considered unworthy of attention.

The Illinois Governmental Ethics Act (apparently last changed in 1995) provides:

(5 ILCS 420/2-110)

Sec. 2-110. Honoraria.

(a) No member of the General Assembly shall accept any honorarium.

(b) As used in this Section:

“Honorarium” means a payment of money to a member of the General Assembly for an appearance or speech.

and

But State Senator Obama reported accepting honoraria on his 2000 and 2002 tax returns:

2000: On his 2000 Schedule C-EZ, Barack reported that he received $16,500 as a “Foundation director/Educational speaker.”

2002: On his 2002 Schedule C, Barack reported $34,491 for “LEGAL SERVCES / SPEAKING FEES.”

A sad story.

“I walked up to the casino table with nothing really in my pocket. And I’m leavin’ with nothing really in my pocket. But in between that time? Man, was I on a roll.”

3:28 video

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Power-line’s Scott Johnson comments editorially, in the Christian Science Monitor.

When Barack Obama responded to the Ohio plumber who didn’t want his taxes raised by saying that he wanted to “spread the wealth around,” I wanted to tell the Illinois senator to spread his own wealth around.

Senator Obama, in a rare moment of candor, all but told “Joe the plumber” that his wealth should be seized in the name of equity. Their personal encounter this past Sunday played out one of the old themes of democratic politics: the appeal to the many to take from the few. It’s traditionally an easy sell in democratic regimes.

Despite Obama’s implication to the contrary, however, it doesn’t represent much in the way of change.

The personal income tax, the federal government’s main source of revenue, is collected overwhelmingly from a relative handful of Americans. Indeed, the most recent IRS data shows that the top 1 percent of filers paid nearly 40 percent of all income taxes. That means the top 1 percent paid about the same as the bottom 95 percent, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan research group. The bottom 50 percent paid just 3 percent.

A good animated commentary from Reason TV:

4:05 video

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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the City of Brotherly Love has joined Indianapolis (677,401 Registered out of 644,197 eligible) in the “more registered voters than residents” category, courtesy of ACORN.

Republicans also have questioned the validity of thousands of new registrations, in Pennsylvania and across the country, collected by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform, known as ACORN.

A senior Philadelphia election official said yesterday that the city had discovered about 1,200 possibly fraudulent voter registrations – almost all of them submitted by ACORN - and had turned them over to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for criminal investigation. ...

In Philadelphia, the number of registrants, 1.1 million, actually exceeds the census count of the eligible population. The city has identified 58,000 “duplicate” registrations, and the actual number of eligible voters on the rolls is probably closer to a million, said the election board’s Bob Lee.

Biden: “I don’t have any Joe the Plumbers in my neighborhood that make $250,000 a year and are worried.”

1:12 video

Of course he doesn’t. How many plumbers (even those grossing $250K per annum) could possibly afford to live in Delaware’s Chateau Country like Joe Biden?

Delaware Online:

First elected to the Senate 36 years ago, (Biden) lives off Barley Mill Road in Greenville—northern Delaware’s priciest area—on a four-acre lakefront estate in a 7,000-square-foot custom home. Biden also owns a smaller carriage house on his property, where his widowed mother lives.

Local real estate agents said the Biden property is worth at least $2.5 million.

Tom Elia describes how the leftist media and the blogosphere punished the disloyal peasant for presuming to question the tax policies of the Chosen One.

Like many of us, Mr. Wurzelbacher has questions about Barack Obama’s tax policy, among other things.

So what happens to Mr. Wurzelbacher for expressing his views?

Reports in the mainstream media appear claiming that he is unlicensed (even though he doesn’t need one as an employee of a business or as a contractor working on a residence), and that he apparently has a tax lien filed against him.

Not to be outdone, the Daily Kos published his home address for all the world to see.

The Democratic Underground just threw whatever they could at the guy.

Better think a little longer next time if you wish to criticize a Chicago Democrat running for president (or anything else, for that matter).

You might get ‘the treatment.’

Read the whole thing.

How was it Karl Rove described Biden? Wasn’t it “blowhard doofus?”

0:19 video

Via Americans for Limited Government.

Polls conducted by the liberal media keep putting Obama decisively in the lead and awarding him a victory in every debate. There’s no accident here, and the process is the opposite of objective. Whether it’s CNN or Daily Kos doing the polling, the fix is in.

Zombietime is beginning to wonder if the “Obama is winning by a landslide” propaganda blitz could possibly have a downside.

It’s no longer a matter of dispute that the mainstream media, overall, very strongly leans to the left. Over 90% of journalists classify themselves politically as “liberal” to varying degrees, and innumerable instances of left-wing bias on the part of the media have been pointed out by bloggers over the years. Yes, a small subset of media outlets are identifiably conservative, but they are vastly outnumbered, both in sheer numbers and in influence, by the liberal media. This fact takes on intense importance in an era when the “news” becomes (as it has become) a subjective matter. Nearly any fact or incident can be “spun” to Obama’s benefit.

Obama’s supporters and his official campaign have taken great advantage of this felicitous informational landscape—first, that the meta-campaign trumps reality, and second, that the media is cooperative and complicit. For example, after presidential debates, the leading left-wing blogs always coordinate massive online opinion-poll-stuffing campaigns. After the Palin-Biden vice-presidential debate, the overwhelming consensus on conservative and centrist blogs was that Palin had won handily, and that Biden spoke mostly in a soporific monotone while spewing a continuous stream of easily debunked falsehoods. And yet readers of DailyKos, the Huffington Post, Democratic Underground and dozens of other top left-wing blogs swarmed en masse to vote (often repeatedly) in mainstream online polls about the debate, so that afterward, CNN (among many others) could run headlines that said “57% Think Biden Won Debate,” basing their conclusion on the results of the online polls. And once enough of these articles get published, then they themselves become “proof” of the debate’s supposed outcome, and before long (often just a matter of hours) it becomes a “fact” no longer up for discussion that Biden won the debate. This fact is then referenced by pundits, and slips into supposedly neutral news stories. ...

The Obama campaign itself also takes advantage of the sympathetic media to construct a facade of inevitability. The campaign will stage-manage crowds and dictate camera angles so that Obama is seen to not only have overwhelming numbers of fans but the correct demographic proportion of fans; the campaign will coordinate Obama appearances to coincide with rock concerts or other festivals so they can point to the huge crowds who showed up to watch Obama; and the media plays right along.

McCain supporters often complain about this strategy by the Left, going to great pains to point out the poll stuffing, the deceptive photos, the crowd overestimation, the slanted media coverage, and so forth. But should conservatives be so concerned? I propose that McCain supporters should be GLAD this is happening—because the Left is in fact making a disastrous strategic blunder.

A substantial portion of the Left’s strategy during this campaign is to create the perception that as many people as possible are supporting Obama. They strive to not simply show that he has a lot of supporters (which, obviously, he has), but to purposely inflate or exaggerate the numbers in order to make his support seem larger than it really is. The drive to do this seems almost automatic; it is assumed by Obama’s supporters to be the most effective campaign strategy. It’s so automatic that they perhaps are no longer even aware that it is a strategy. But why? What purpose is possibly served by this behavior? Has anyone on the Left ever paused, stepped back, and asked, “Wait a minute—why are we doing this? Are we sure it’s the correct course of action?” Doing everything possible to inflate the perceived support of Democratic candidates has become so de rigueur that the Left has long ago forgotten why they’re even doing it. ...

Now, it could very well be that, after all is said and done, Obama will indeed win this election—I can’t predict the future any better than can anyone else. The Obama campaign and its supporters are also engaging in many other strategies (unrelated to the exaggeration of his popularity) that have likely been effective—such as blanketing the airwaves with advertisements, disparaging McCain, insulting Palin, and so on. The unabashed and unapologetic Obama boosterism from the traditional media certainly isn’t hurting either. In prior elections, candidates worried about an “October Surprise,” some last-minute revelation or scandal that threatens to realign the entire race. But in 2008, two or three October Surprises seem to be cropping up every single day, and there’s no reliable way to predict what will happen next (other than that the media will try to emphasize the anti-McCain news and downplay the anti-Obama news). And it may be that less than 50% of the population was ever interested in voting for McCain in the first place, and that an Obama victory was a foregone conclusion long before the campaign even began; I simply don’t know. However, if Obama does win, it will be IN SPITE OF the counter-productive antics of his supporters, not because of them. I feel that all the exaggerations and bias polling and online poll-stuffing and comment-spamming have only served to increase a desperate come-from-behind energy in the McCain campaign, and induce a sense of complacency and inevitable victory among rank-and-file Obama voters. However: If McCain wins, then Obama’s supporters will only have themselves to blame.

Will the exaggerations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as assumed, or are Obama supporters spinning further and further away from reality, constructing one unsupportable exaggeration on top of another—only to be stunned on election day when the actual results, once again, don’t match either their pre-vote opinion polling or their post-vote exit polling?

Yet it may very well be that an army of glum, dispirited and pessimistic conservatives will reluctantly trudge to the polls on November 4, each one imagining they are the only remaining person in the entire country voting for McCain, and lo and behold—they’ll turn out to be a silent majority after all.

Read the whole thing.

Bernardine Dorhn

Last night, Barack Obama denied launching his political career in the living room of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn prior to his first run for the Illinois State Senate in 1995.

That denial must be based upon quibbling over the difference between a formal announcement at a Ramada Inn, September 19, 1995, and an “introduction” to prominent liberal Hyde Park democrats over coffee at Chez Ayers whose specific date is uncertain but which occurred around very much the same time. Lynn Sweet.

The precise chronological order of Obama’s 1995 campaign events is obviously less important than the question of his association and long term relationship with terrorists and the nature of their crimes.

WorldNetDaily quotes an FBI informant:

While defenders of unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers cling to the rationalization that he never killed anyone during a spree of bombings in the 1970s, his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, built and planted the bomb that killed a San Francisco police officer in 1970, an FBI report claimed. ...

While Ayers himself has never been implicated in a death among the high-profile bombings of the Capitol, the Pentagon and several other targets of the Weather Underground he served as a leader, it’s not true that there were no fatalities associated with the attacks.

On Feb. 16, 1970, Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell of the San Francisco Police Department was killed by shrapnel from an anti-personnel bomb planted on a window ledge at the force’s Park Station. The pipe bomb was filled with heavy metal staples and lead bullet projectiles. Another officer, Robert Fogarty, received serious wounds to his face and legs, and was partially blinded in the attack.

Dohrn, then living in a Weather Underground cell on a Sausalito, Calif., houseboat, has long been suspected of involvement in the bombing.

An FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who successfully penetrated the organization from the late summer of 1969 until April 1970, later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that Ayers, then a high-ranking leader of the organization and a member of its Central Committee (but not then Dohrn’s husband), told him Dohrn constructed and planted the bomb.

Grathwohl testified that Ayers had told him specifically where the bomb was placed (on a window ledge) and what kind of shrapnel was put in it. Grathwohl said Ayers was emphatic, leading Grathwohl to believe Ayers either was present at some point during the operation or had heard about it from someone who was there. In a book about his experiences published in 1976, Grathwohl wrote that Ayers, who had recently attended a meeting of the group’s Central Committee, said Dohrn had planned the operation, made the bomb and placed it herself.

Grathwohl recounted in his report that Ayers complained to other Weather Underground operatives that they were not contributing enough to the bombing campaigns, pointing out that Dohrn built the bomb and planted it herself.

Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell, SFPD, murdered February 16, 1970

Virginia Senator Jim Webb wouldn’t sign on as Barack Obama’s running mate, but he’s willing to overlook the obvious major differences between Obama’s ultra-liberal positions and his own in order to endorse, and assure us that he trusts, Obama. He trusts Obama even to defend the Second Amendment, he says.

1:00 radio ad

Our family tradition of hunting and shooting are a way of life to me, and no government will ever take that away. I am an NRA member and I know that my friend Barack Obama will protect our second amendment rights. So don’t be misled about Barack Obama…I trust him to protect our right to keep and bear arms.

On what possible basis, Senator Webb? Barack Obama has the most leftwing voting record of any senator. Obama scores to the left of socialist Bernie Saunders. His gun control record is impeccable. He’s a 100% supporter of Gun Control.

And Obama isn’t only endorsed by you, he’s endorsed by the Brady Campaign.

Senators Barack Obama and Joseph Biden know that we make it too easy for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons in this country. They know that our weak gun laws have too many loopholes, which lead to over 30,000 deaths and 70,000 injuries from guns every year.

“Senators Obama and Biden know that we can reduce those deaths and injuries from guns by strengthening our Brady background check system, getting military-style assault weapons off our streets, and giving law enforcement more tools to stop the trafficking of illegal guns.

But the National Rifle Association, to which both Senator Webb and I belong, says Obama would be “the most anti-gun president in American history.” The NRA notes:

Obama voted to ban hundreds of rifles and shotguns commonly used for hunting and sport shooting
(Illinois Senate, SB 1195, 3/13/03)

Obama endorsed a ban on all handguns
(Independent Voters of Illinois/Independent Precinct Organization general candidate questionnaire, 9/9/96, Politico, 03/31/08)

Obama voted to allow the prosecution of people who use a firearm for self-defense in their homes
(Illinois Senate, S.B. 2165, vote 20, 3/25/04)

Obama supported increasing taxes on firearms and ammunition by 500 percent
(Chicago Defender, 12/13/99)

Obama voted to ban almost all rifle ammunition commonly used for hunting and sport shooting
(United States Senate, S. 397, vote 217, 7/29/05)

Obama opposes Right-to-Carry laws
(Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 4/2/08, Chicago Tribune, 9/15/04)

Jim Webb’s word to gun owners and Virginians clearly is not worth very much. He really has become a democrat. Shame on Webb.

In a 1985 interview, Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov reveals the KGB’s strategy of demoralization and describes the ultimate fate of Western sympathisers.

16:35 video

The Telegraph reports an especially flagrant case of Hollywood partisanship.

The studio has temporarily blocked the release of the DVD version of the 1987 film Hanoi Hilton, which will feature an interview with John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, about his imprisonment in Hoa Lo prison during the war.

The film, which gave a favourable portrayal of US prisoners, will now be released on November 11 – a week after the election.

Warner Brothers’s decision is likely to raise suggestions that it did not want to aid Mr McCain’s campaign by highlighting his wartime acts. The Republican candidate, who was a Navy pilot, was tortured during his imprisonment after being shot down over North Vietnam in October 1967.

Barry Meyer, the company’s chairman and chief executive, last month attended a fundraising dinner for Barack Obama, Mr McCain’s Democratic opponent.

The move has angered Lionel Chetwynd, the film’s writer and director, who is a well-known conservative.

“Finding someone in Hollywood who says they don’t want to affect the election is like finding a virgin in a brothel,” Mr Chetwynd told the New York Times.

Ross Douthat argues that a more successful McCain campaign with better poll results would have stiffened the spines of those representatives of the center-right punditocracy currently finding all sorts of reasons (“first class temperament”) requiring them to desert the Republican cause and make peace with a Marxist democrat.

Suppose that you accept the most cynical account of, say, Peggy Noonan’s uncertainty about whom to vote for in this election, or Christopher Buckley’s Obama endorsement – that they’re just craven, self-interested bandwagon jumpers who want to keep getting invited to all those swanky cocktail parties I keep hearing about. Suppose that you regard every right-of-center writer – or single-issue fellow traveler with the Bush Republicans, in the case of Christopher Hitchens – who’s publicly hurled brickbats at the McCain campaign as a quisling and a coward, a stooge for liberalism and a rat fleeing a fast-sinking ship. In such circumstances, what’s the best course of action – denouncing the rats, or trying to figure out why the hell the ship is sinking? Even if Brooks and Noonan and Buckley and Dreher and Kathleen Parker and David Frum and Heather Mac Donald and Bruce Bartlett and George Will and on and on – note the ideological diversity in the ranks of conservatives who aren’t Helping The Team these days – are all just snobs and careerists who quit or cavil or cover their asses when the going gets tough and their “seat at the table” is threatened, an American conservative movement that consists entirely of those pundits with the rock-hard testicular fortitude required to never take sides against the family seems like a pretty small tent at this point. And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I’d be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back. Who knows? It might just be the sort of ship that swing-state voters will want to climb on board as well.

Douthat is right in observing that, when you’re winning, the wimps, opportunists, and trimmers have neither need nor incentive to take French leave, but, alas! no political party, no philosophical school of thought can always win. Sometimes fate and circumstances are against you. Sometimes victory in a particular contest, in a particular election year, is impossible. And it is at those unfortunate times that we get to discover that in the contemporary political wars not everyone is another Roland or another Leonidas.

Read the whole thing.

Chris Buckley snidely takes his leave of National Review (and the Conservative Movement), indignantly remarking on the narrowness and intolerance of a Conservatism which prefers moose-hunters to Harvard men, and which has a problem with supporting an ultra-liberal democrat with a closet-full of unsavory radical connections for the White House on the same kind of class consciousness basis that led Dean Acheson to refuse to “turn (his) back on Alger Hiss.”

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith. ...

My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. ... Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up.

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

Supporting Allard Lowenstein against Nassau County Republican John Wydler, Chris is right, was an irresponsible, un-conservative abberation in which Bill Buckley obviously allowed personal friendship to outweigh principle. His support of Joe Lieberman against the egregious Republican-in-Name-Only Lowell Weicker was, on the other hand, an impeccably sound conservative decision. And Buckley père may have liked John Kenneth Galbraith as a skiing or drinking buddy, but he certainly never endorsed Galbraith’s fallacious economic opinions and pernicious political positions.

Chris shouldn’t be surprised that an October Dolchstoß (“backstab”) in favor of the most radical and exotic democrat ever to threaten the freedom of the American Republic would not cause the gang at the Conservative Movement’s favorite bar to offer to buy him any drinks.

Rich Lowry describes Chris’s resignation offer rather differently, quoting him as promising that were his offer to depart to be accepted, there “would be no hard feelings, only warmest regards and understanding.” Chris’s second Daily Beast column features plenty of hard feelings.

Too bad for us that we’re so narrow-minded that we actually allow mere political ideology to stand in the way of Ivy League Establishment solidarity, Marxists included, against those uncouth Alaskan gentiles.

Thomas Sowell describes the real rationale behind the mainstream media’s attempts to ban negativity from presidential politics.

One of the oldest phenomena of American elections—criticism of one’s opponent—has in recent times been stigmatized by much of the media as “negative advertising.”

Is this because the criticism has gotten more vicious or more personal? You might think so, if you were totally ignorant of history, as so many of the graduates of even our elite universities are. ...

Even giants like Lincoln and Jefferson were called names that neither McCain nor Obama has been called.

Why then is “negative advertising” such a big deal these days? The dirty little secret is this: Liberal candidates have needed to escape their past and pretend that they are not liberals, because so many voters have had it with liberals.

In 1988, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts called himself a “technocrat,” a pragmatic solver of problems, despite a classic liberal track record of big spending, big taxes, and policies that were anti-business and pro-criminal.

When the truth about what he actually did as governor was brought out during the Presidential election campaign, the media were duly shocked—not by Dukakis’ record, but by the Republicans’ exposing his record.

John Kerry, with a very similar ultra-liberal record, topped off by inflammatory and unsubstantiated attacks on American military men in Vietnam, disdained the whole process of labeling as something unworthy. And the mainstream media closed ranks around him as well, deploring those who labeled Kerry a liberal.

Barack Obama is much smoother. Instead of issuing explicit denials, he gives speeches that sound so moderate, so nuanced and so lofty that even some conservative Republicans go for them. How could anyone believe that such a man is the very opposite of what he claims to be—unless they check out the record of what he has actually done?

In words, Obama is a uniter instead of a divider. In deeds, he has spent years promoting polarization. That is what a “community organizer” does, creating a sense of grievance, envy and resentment, in order to mobilize political action to get more of the taxpayers’ money or to force banks to lend to people they don’t consider good risks, as the community organizing group ACORN did.

After Barack Obama moved beyond the role of a community organizer, he promoted the same polarization in his other roles.

That is what he did when he spent the money of the Woods Fund bankrolling programs to spread the politics of grievance and resentment into the schools. That is what he did when he spent the taxpayers’ money bankrolling the grievance and resentment ideology of Michael Pfleger.

When Barack Obama donated $20,000 to Jeremiah Wright, does anyone imagine that he was unaware that Wright was the epitome of grievance, envy and resentment hype? Or were Wright’s sermons too subtle for Obama to pick up that message?

How subtle is “Goddamn America!”?

Yet those in the media who deplore “negative advertising” regard it as unseemly to dig up ugly facts instead of sticking to the beautiful rhetoric of an election year. The oft-repeated mantra is that we should trick to the “real issues.”

James Lewis, at American Thinker, explains how the domestic and international left are responsible for Iran and North Korea becoming nuclear powers.

The single most suicidal action by the Left has been its years of assault on President George W. Bush after the overthrow of Saddam. It has often been pointed out that every intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction before the invasion of Iraq. UN inspectors like David Kay repeatedly said so. Democrats and European socialists alike repeated warned about the danger of Saddam’s weapons programs, knowing full well that his first nuclear reactor was destroyed by an Israeli air raid as long ago as 1981. Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and even the UN’s El Baradei pointed out the danger.

As we now know, Saddam has had 500 metric tons of yellowcake uranium in storage since 1992. But George W. Bush was assaulted by the Left, in the person of Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson and the New York Times editorial page, allegedly because Bush peddled the lie that Saddam wanted to obtain yellowcake uranium. But there was no lie; the whole phony brouhaha was a PR assault to destroy the credibility of the Bush administration. The end result was to make us helpless in the face of more nuclear proliferation. To slake its lust for power the Left was more than willing to sabotage our safety.

Did Saddam pose a plausible threat of nuclear weaponization? Of course he did. Did he pose an actual threat? That is, did he actually possess WMD’s ready to mount on missiles in a matter of hours, to shoot off at his enemies? Today’s conventional wisdom is that he did not. But that is pure post-hockery.

George W. Bush has been crucified for five long years in the media, by the feckless, hysterical and cowardly Europeans, by the United Nations, and of course by the Democratic Party, because he took the only sane action possible in the face of the apparent WMD threat from Saddam. Because presidents don’t have the luxury of Monday morning quarterbacking. They cannot wait for metaphysical certainty about threats to national survival and international peace. There is no such thing as metaphysical certainty in these matters; presidents must act on incomplete intelligence, knowing full well that their domestic enemies will try to destroy them for trying to save the peace.

But that is water under the bridge by now. What’s not past, but rather a clear and present threat to civilization are the consequences of the unbelievable recklessness of the International Left—- including the Democrats, the Europeans, the UN, and the former communist powers. Because of their screaming opposition to the Bush administration’s rational actions against Saddam, we are now rendered helpless against two even more dangerous challenges. With Saddam there was genuine doubt about his nuclear program; the notion that he had a viable program was just the safest guess to make in the face of his policy of deliberate ambiguity. In the case of Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il there’s no guessing any more. They have nukes and missiles, or will have within a year.

The entire anti-proliferation effort has therefore been sabotaged and probably ruined by the Left. For what reason? There can be only one rational reason: A lust for power, even at the expense of national and international safety and peace. But the Left has irrational reasons as well, including an unfathomable hatred for adulthood in the face of mortal danger. Like the Cold War, this is a battle between the adolescent rage of the Left and the realistic adult decision-making of the mainstream—- a mainstream which is now tenuously maintained only by conservatives in the West.

Via mlajoie2.

Tired of government messing up your economy? Don’t want some Obamessiah spreading your wealth around? Feeling a little more anarchistic than usual? EconTalk has articles and a podcast on achieving autonomy by homesteading on the high seas.

Obama explains to a hard-working plumber in Ohio how Socialism works.

Fox News:

Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed “more and more for fulfilling the American dream.”

“It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success too,” Obama responded. “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody … I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

2:36 video

Christopher Columbus (detail), from Alejo Fernández, La Virgen de los Navegantes, circa 1505 to 1536, Alcázares Reales de Sevilla.

In his magisterial Admiral of the Ocean Sea, 1942, Samuel Elliot Morrison writes:

(Christopher Columbus did) more to direct the course of history than any individual since Augustus Caesar. Yet the life of the Admiral closed on a note of frustration. He had not found the Strait, or met the Grand Khan, or converted any great number of heathen, or regained Jerusalem. He had not even secured the future of his family. And the significance of what he had accomplished was only slightly less obscure to him than to the chroniclers who neglected to record his death, or to the courtiers who failed to attend his modest funeral at Valladolid. The vast extent and immense resources of the Americas were but dimly seen; the mighty ocean that laved their western shores had not yet yielded her secret.

America would eventually have been discovered if the Great Enterprise of Columbus had been rejected; yet who can predict what hat would have been the outcome? The voyage that took him to “The Indies” and home was no blind chance, but the creation of his own brain and soul, long studied, carefully planned, repeatedly urged on indifferent princes, and carried through by virtue of his courage, sea-knowledge and indomitable will. No later voyage could ever have such spectacular results, and Columbus’s fame would have been secure had he retired from the sea in 1493. Yet a lofty ambition to explore further, to organize the territories won for Castile, and to complete the circuit of the globe, sent him thrice more to America. These voyages, even more than the first, proved him to be the greatest navigator of his age, and enabled him to train the captains and pilots who were to display the banners of Spain off every American cape and island between Fifty North and Fifty South. The ease with which he dissipated the unknown terrors of the Ocean, the skill with which he found his way out and home, again and again, led thousands of men from every Western European nation into maritime adventure and exploration. And if Columbus was a failure as a colonial administrator, it was partly because his conception of a colony transcended the desire of his followers to impart, and the capacity of natives to receive, the institutions and culture of Renaissance Europe. ...

One only wishes that the Admiral might have been afforded the sense of fulfillment that would have come from foreseeing all that flowed from his discoveries; that would have turned all the sorrows of his last years to joy. The whole history of the Americas stem from the Four Voyages of Columbus; and as the Greek city-states looked back to the deathless gods as their founders, so today a score of independent nations and dominions unite in homage to Christopher the stout-hearted son of Genoa, who carried Christian civilization across the Ocean Sea.

1:18 video
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Does Ayers matter? Read Jim Treacher’s response.

Roger Kimball responds to his friend Chris Buckley’s endorsement of Obama.

The sub-text is an effort to assign those of us who decline to offer our support for The One We’ve Been Waiting For a place in the limbo of right-wing cloud-cuckoodom. At a strategic moment, Christo quotes his father: “I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” You don’t have to be a student of Quintilian to understand that sheep are being segregated from goats here, and those of us who have serious qualms about Obama are being mustered on the wrong side of that divide. A similar principle of exclusion is at work in his reference to “Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin.” The Sanhedrin was the ancient court that tried Jesus and found him wanting. Who is on trial here? Obama? McCain? Or, Dear Reader, is it you?

Buckley says he is endorsing Obama as a “first rate intellect” largely on the evidence of his memoirs. But there is uncertainty that Obama actually wrote them. The reality is that, in this election as during the later years of the War in Vietnam, the pressure to conform brought to bear upon members of the community of fashion has become intense enough to cause the weak to buckle.

Mark Steyn reflects on the ideological division between the two Americas.

The term “cold civil war” was originated in William Gibson’s Spook Country, and applied about a year ago to current politics by Hyacinth Girl.

In the United States, especially in the present election, we get glimpses of two political solitudes that have been created not by any plausible socio-economic division within society, nor by any deep division between different ethnic tribes, but tautologically by the notion of “two solitudes” itself. The nation is divided, roughly half-and-half, between people who instinctively resent the Nanny State, and those who instinctively long for its ministrations. And every kind of specious racial, economic, cultural and class division has been thrown into the mix to add to its toxicity. ...

Only in America are they so equally balanced. Elsewhere in the West, the true believers in the Nanny State have long since prevailed.

Democrats and Republicans have become two solitudes, and so, the result of the election will be ugly, no matter which side wins.

Gizmodo takes perhaps an overly censorious view of one man’s passion.

Personally, I think the Bradster’s setup is highly impressive, in its own peculiar way Homeric. It would be interesting to watch him multi-task.

World of Warcraft player/dorkmaster supreme Bradster has caved to his smack addiction-like dependence on WoW and created 36 separate accounts that he plays simultaneously on an epically ridiculous rig. He claims to spend over $5700 per year just on the game, and plans to pick up 36 copies of the new expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King when it’s released. ...

Bradster’s setup features a whopping seven separate laptops, four desktops hidden away under the desk, and an array of screens that’s disorienting even in a static image. He might be the only person on earth who’s capable of using the 15-button mouse.

older photo of MV Iran Deyanat in different paint

After Somali pirates hijacked the Iranian freighter MV Iran Deyanat (aka Deyant or Dianat) on August 21, 2008, as ransom negotiations proceeded, in late September, reports of strange illnesses striking down the pirates began appearing in the international press.

South Africa Times 9/28:

Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.

Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.”

ShiratDevorah offers the following explanation:

The MV Iran Deyanat is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) – a state-owned company run by the Iranian military that was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on September 10, shortly after the ship’s hijacking.

According to the U.S. Government, the company regularly falsifies shipping documents in order to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments to avoid the attention of shipping authorities, and employs the use of cover entities to circumvent United Nations sanctions to facilitate weapons proliferation for the Iranian Ministry of Defense. The MV Iran Deyanat departed Nanjing, China, July 28, and, according to its manifest, planned to sail to Rotterdam, where it would offload 42,500 tons of iron ore and “industrial products” purchased by an unidentified “ German client”. The ship has a crew of 29 men, including a Pakistani captain, an Iranian engineer, 13 other Iranians, 3 Indians, 2 Filipinos, and 10 Eastern Europeans, stated to be Albanians.

The MV Iran Deyanat was brought to Eyl, a sleepy fishing village in northeastern Somalia, and was secured by a larger gang of pirates – 50 onboard and 50 onshore. The Somali pirates attempted to inspect the ship’s seven cargo containers but the containers were locked. The crew claimed that they did not have the “access codes” and could not open them. Pirates have stated they were unable to open the hold without causing extensive damage to the ship, and threatened to blow it up. The Iranian ship’s captain and the engineer were contacted by cell phone and demanded to disclose the actual nature of the mysterious “powdered cargo” but the captain and his officers were very evasive. Initially they said that the cargo contained “crude oil” but then claimed it contained “minerals.” Following this initial rebuff, the pirates broke open one of the containers and discovered it to be filled with packets of what they said was “a powdery fine sandy soil” ....

Within a period of three days, those pirates who had boarded the ship and opened the cargo container with its gritty sand-like contents, all developed strange health complications, to include serious skin burns and loss of hair. And within two weeks, sixteen of the pirates subsequently died, either on the ship or on shore. ...

Although American intelligence and government sources are maintaining a strictly observed silence, the same does not apply to the Russians and so it is that we learn the real story of the MV Iran Deyanat. She was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.

Given the large number of deaths from the questing Somali pirates, it should be obvious that when the contents of the ship’s locked cargo containers finally descended onto the land, the death toll would be enormous. This ship was nothing more nor less than the long-anticipated Iranian attack on Israel. Not the expected rocket attacks (which could be intercepted by the Israelis) but an even more deadly and unexpected attack by sea. It is very interesting to note that the Israeli government has in the past few weeks, been loudly demanding that the United States establish a naval blockade of Iran.

On October 10, Iran evidently having paid the required ransom, the Deyanat was released, and allowed to depart. It sailed apparently in the direction of Muscat.

Mark Steyn (now free from Canadian prosecution for un-PC speech) would prefer a less mystical adversary from the left.

The day after the debate I bumped into two Obama supporters in St Johnsbury, Vermont who said isn’t it great that he’s on course to win. Well, they were cute chicks, and I know an obvious pick-up line when I hear one, so I stopped to chat. God Almighty, it was like reverse Viagra: After ten minutes of Babes For Barack, I never want to meet a female woman of the opposite sex for the rest of my life. Their basic pitch was:

How do you solve a problem? Like, Obama!

How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?

That’s John McCain’s problem. Traditionally, when an unknown politician emerges on the national scene, it’s a race to define him. Governor Palin is a good example: within days, the coastal sophisticates were mocking her as a chillbilly ditz with a womb that spits out inbred kids faster than the First National Bank of Welfare Swamp issues subprime mortgages. That’s politics as usual: Define your opponent. But Obama is defined by his indefinability. When I pointed out to my Vermont gals that he lives in a swank pad that was part of some shady real estate deal with a convicted fraudster (Tony Rezko), that he entrusted his daughters’ entire religious education to a neo-segregationist anti-American nut who preaches that the government created the AIDS virus to kill black people (Jeremiah Wright), that he attended fundraisers with a political patron who’s an unrepentant terrorist proud of plotting to blow up young ladies just like them at a dance at the Fort Dix military base (William Ayers), when I pointed all this out, they looked at me as if I’d brought a baseball bat to a croquet match. Mere earthbound politicians are defined by their real estate deals and sleazy buddies, but Obama is defined only by his vibe. As his many admirers in France would say, he has a certain je ne sais quoi. And, if you try to pin down quoi precisely, then they don’t want to sais.

Besides, said one of the cuties, it’s racist to try to link him to unsavory white men (Ayers). And black men (Wright). And Arabs (Rezko). And, just to be on the safe side, any dodgy Uzbeks or Papuans who might have been lurking around the greater Chicago area for the last quarter century. The ladies weren’t exactly covering their eyes and going, “Neee-neeee-na-na, can’t hear you,” but the other cutie did begin waving at me her Obama sticker — the one with the giant blue-frosted O embedded in a manicured candy-striped upland — like the villain in the movie trying to hypnotize you with his pocketwatch. I began frantically looking around in hopes that a passing Hare Krishna or Scientologist type could get me out of there. But, no: Gaze into the giant zero of the Obama logo, the hole in the star-spangled donut, the vast fathomless nullity that is the gaping keyhole to the door of utopia. To a sad shriveled Republican cynic, there’s nothing there but the wide open spaces of Obama’s blank resume. But a believer will see therein the healing of the planet and the receding of the oceans. The black hole of Obama will suck you in through the awesome power of its totally cool suckiness.

Read the whole thing.

A prominent news agency is reporting that Antoin Rezko is singing like a bird to prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and that Illinois democrats are trembling in their boots.
————————————————————-

HillBuzz rumors that Fitzgerald is after the ultimate scalp for his personal collection: Barack Obama’s.

The Sun Times today gave a major clue that Barack Obama will indeed go down with Tony Rezko, sooner rather than later. It looks as though Rezko is about to turn on Alexi Giannoulias, the 30-year old State Treasurer of Illinois (who was elected only because Obama backed him).

Here’s where all the clues are…and then we’ll walk you through the local Chicago politics on how today’s hint by the Sun Times has us convinced, for the first time ever, that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could indeed send Barack Obama to jail.

Sounds too good to be true, but we are certainly going to be keeping an eye out for further developments.

Private Sam Wilson’s Walker Colt and flask

The all-time auction record for a Colt Revolver was made his week at James D. Julia, Inc. in Fairfield, Maine, when a Colt Whitneyville Walker, marked “Company A #201,” issued at Vera Cruz in 1847 to Texas Ranger Private Sam Wilson sold for $920,000.

Samuel Colt produced, between 1847 and 1849, roughly 1100 massive .44 caliber revolvers along the lines suggested by Texas Ranger Captain Samuel Walker.

The Walker Colt could be argued to have been the most powerful handgun in the world up until the introduction of the .357 Magnum in 1935. Its use by Texas Rangers in the Mexican War and in frontier battles with the Comanche Indians combined with its rarity and extraordinary size all combine to make the Walker Colt the ne plus ultra of 19th century collectible revolvers.

Antique and Auction News explains why this particular example was so desirable.

With the Wilson/Kenly Walker there are some specific attributes that make this example stand far above all others known. First of all is its spectacular condition. The Walker was so revered during its period of use that one of the first actions that occurred as a Texas Ranger fell in battle was the retrieval of his Walker pistol. The thousand martial Walker pistols originally produced saw a tremendous use in future years. Those few examples that have survived are almost all in extremely worn and well-used condition. Very rarely is there even a hint of finish left on the revolver. It is not uncommon to find many or most of the markings worn off, parts replaced, etc. The Wilson/Kenly Revolver, however, is in extraordinary condition, retaining 40-60% of its original finish, and of equal importance, retaining all of the inspector marks, proof marks, and other fragile idiosyncrasies almost never seen on other surviving Walkers. This resulting masterpiece literally makes it a reference study in what a real martial Walker looked like at the time of issue.

A second very appealing aspect of this important revolver is its impeccable provenance. The gun was originally issued to Samuel Wilson, a private in the Texas Rangers. Not only is it recorded that the Walkers were issued to his Company, Wilson also scratched his name on the brass trigger guard of this most prized of his possessions. Wilson unfortunately died in late 1847 or early 1848 at Jalapa and Major Kenly, at that time Jalapa’s Garrison Commandant and in charge of the hospital, obviously obtained the gun at Wilson’s demise. He kept this and other items he collected throughout the battle for his entire life, and passed them on down to his descendants. The consignor, an octogenarian from Libby, Montana, first saw the gun in 1941 when he and his mother retrieved it along with the Walker Flask from the family homestead. It had been in the possession of his mother’s aunt (Kenly was a great-uncle to this aunt). The Colt Walker A Company No. 210 has never been outside the family, nor ever offered for private sale before. October 7, 2008 will be the first time. The Walker will be offered with a $500,000 to $1,000,000 pre-sale estimate.

James D. Julia press release

Maine Morning Sentinel story

Shooting a replica Walker Colt 9:01 video

Christopher Buckley has endorsed Obama.

This from the son of the man who wrote: “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

Kimberly Strassel, in the Wall Street Journal, admires the showmanship of Barack Obama’s promises.

And now, America, we introduce the Great Obama! The world’s most gifted political magician! A thing of wonder. A thing of awe. Just watch him defy politics, economics, even gravity! (And hold your applause until the end, please.)

To kick off our show tonight, Mr. Obama will give 95% of American working families a tax cut, even though 40% of Americans today don’t pay income taxes! How can our star enact such mathemagic? How can he “cut” zero? Abracadabra! It’s called a “refundable tax credit.” It involves the federal government taking money from those who do pay taxes, and writing checks to those who don’t. Yes, yes, in the real world this is known as “welfare,” but please try not to ruin the show.

For his next trick, the Great Obama will jumpstart the economy, and he’ll do it by raising taxes on the very businesses that are today adrift in a financial tsunami! That will include all those among the top 1% of taxpayers who are in fact small-business owners, and the nation’s biggest employers who currently pay some of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. Mr. Obama will, with a flick of his fingers, show them how to create more jobs with less money. It’s simple, really. He has a wand.

Next up, Mr. Obama will re-regulate the economy, with no ill effects whatsoever! You may have heard that for the past 40 years most politicians believed deregulation was good for the U.S. economy. You might have even heard that much of today’s financial mess tracks to loose money policy, or Fannie and Freddie excesses. Our magician will show the fault was instead with our failure to clamp down on innovation and risk-taking, and will fix this with new, all-encompassing rules. Presto! ...

Tada!

You can clap now. (Applause. Cheers.) We’d like to thank a few people in the audience. Namely, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who has so admirably restrained himself from running up on stage to debunk any of these illusions and spoil everyone’s fun.

Read the whole thing.

Daily Mail

The Telegraph reports another inversion of the rule of law in contemporary Britain.

A gardener who fenced off his allotment patch with a single strand of barbed wire to protect it from thieves has been ordered to take it down in case intruders hurt themselves.

Bill Malcolm, 61, was told to “remove it on health and safety grounds” by the local council, which owns the allotments.

He erected the deterrent after thieves struck three times in four months, stealing more than £300 worth of spades, forks, hoes and wrecking his potato patch in the process.

But officials instructed Mr Malcolm to remove the waist-high wire from his plot at Round Hill Allotments in Marlbrook, Worcs.

He said: “It’s an absolutely ridiculous situation, all I wanted was to protect my property but the wire had to go in case a thief scratched himself.

“The council said they were unhappy about the precautions I had made but my response was to tell them that only someone climbing over on to my allotment could possibly hurt themselves.

“They shouldn’t be trespassing in the first place but the council apologised and said they didn’t want to be sued by a wounded thief.

In New Republic, David Samuels uses Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a touchstone to penetrate beyond the “blank canvas” onto which the American electorate has been invited to project its fantasies and desires to capture glimpses of the real personality of Barack Obama.

Samuels is as ravished by the idea of so good a writer, so fine a speaker, such an intriguing literary creation as Obama ascending to the presidency as many of us are alarmed and horrified by the same portrait of a calculating and angry half-breed in love with power and eager to wreak vengeance for his own birth.

What a subject for Joseph Conrad Obama would have made.

It is one of the outstanding ironies of Obama’s story that his political rise has been fueled by a tactical grasp of the same racial logic that condemned Ellison’s invisible man to living in a basement by himself. The blank screen approach that Obama has embraced works well in a moment dominated by the collapse of Wall Street and the Iraq war, issues for which all possible solutions seem unpalatable; what voters want is to feel that things will change, without too much uncomfortable detail about what will actually happen. The fact that the candidate does not make the usual appeal to the authenticity of his personal story makes the usual attacks on him seem nonsensical, regardless of whether or not they are true, a fact that the Clintons lamented during the primary season and John McCain will find equally frustrating during the general election. Crazy right-wing charges that Obama shares the loonier opinions of Dr. Wright or that he is a secret Muslim blend seamlessly into reports of his calls for immediately beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq or his promise to sit down with the leaders of Iran and North Korea without preconditions, or the fact that he began his political career at Bill Ayers’s house in Chicago, or that his financial backer Tony Rezko was a scummy slumlord who paid for the Obamas to have a new backyard. None of it sticks, because Obama is not that kind of candidate. The campaign uses the Ellisonian condition of invisibility to its advantage while also exerting a powerful form of mental jujitsu on guilty white liberals, a species that Obama knows well: Attacks on the candidate are simply projections of the (racist) mentality of his accusers. As they erase the weirder and more specific points of his sensibility in a blizzard of superlatives, whites create an image of a black superman as a kind of photo-negative image of liberal guilt. ...

In a scene (in Dreams of My Father) that owes an obvious debt to Ellison’s famous Battle Royal, in which two black boys are made to fight each other in a boxing ring, the narrator is taken out into the backyard of his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro’s small house in Jakarta and is made to put on gloves and fight. “The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable, and often cruel,” he saw. “My grandparents knew nothing about such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them.” Emboldened, Obama asks his stepfather if he ever saw anyone killed, and Lolo says yes.

“Why was the man killed? The one you saw?” the young Obama asks.

“Because he was weak,” Lolo answers, instructing his half-American, half-Kenyan stepson in the age-old logic of the world outside sunny Hawaii. Obama’s version of the scene ends with a searing recognition that the white part of his family lives in a fantasy world in which the need to learn such ugly lessons simply does not exist. While Obama’s Third World-ism carries with it a certain assumption of American historical guilt, it should not be confused with the cult of victimization that is still popular on college campuses. Obama identifies with his father, Lolo, and other post-colonial men because they are strong. Dark-skinned men can understand power in a way that white men like his grandfather can’t. If you are not strong, Lolo continues, “be clever and make peace with someone who is strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always.”

The most outstanding characteristic of the portrait that Obama draws of his white mother, who also serves as a stand-in for white liberal readers of his book, is her hatred for power—a characteristic that her son finds naive and contemptible. “Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse,” Obama wrote, of his mother’s response to the inequities of Indonesian society. “Guilt is a luxury that only foreigners can afford,” her husband Lolo responds. “Like saying whatever pops into your head.” What is notable about this and other passages in Dreams from My Father is the extent to which Obama’s identifies with the verbal slap and with its speaker, rather than with his mother, a girlish and naive white American liberal. White Americans like his mother and his grandfather are unsuitable sources for the author’s evolving subjectivity because they are blinded by the privileges of their race to the realities of power.

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right. Yet it is hard not to be haunted by the feeling that Obama’s admiration for dark-skinned strength is the mirror image of his personal feelings of weakness and inauthenticity, and that the personality that he has cobbled together out of the historical experience of other men in other time. ...

Obama has impaled himself on the horns of a painful dilemma. While the identity that he constructed for himself in his autobiography has allowed him to blossom as a man and as a politician, it bears little resemblance to the conventional narratives of white men who run for president—and contains elements that are likely to frighten off large portions of the electorate, before or after November 4. The story of a man who identifies with a foreign father, and with people who are not Americans, and who does so on the basis of the color of their skin, flies in the face of the simplistic racial pieties that white Americans have embraced since the end of Jim Crow. The identity that Obama so painstakingly created for himself is not one that he can share with the electorate, and so the price of his political success is that he is forced to sublimate the material he had so painfully excavated and again become invisible. His image-makers create new stories about the candidate, which ring false and drain his marvelous abilities as a writer, a speaker, and a leader.

Read the whole thing.

New McCain ad discussing Obama’s ties to domestic terrorist William Ayers.

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Ha tip to Captain Ed.

The Howard Stern Show tests the role of the issues in the decisions of some Harlem voters.

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Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Jack Cashill thinks he recognizes similarities of style in the memoirs of both men.

A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama’s election as Harvard’s first black (law review) president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama’s proposed memoir.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.

According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.

Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar. ...

I bought Bill Ayers’ 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like “Obama.” In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama’s casual speech.

Obama’s memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama’s path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama’s career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama’s belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.

Unprovable, but intriguing.

9:46 video

Rob of Say Anything notes that the Obama campaign’s $800,000 payment to ACORN seems to be producing visible results.

According to STATSIndiana, In 2007, Indianapolis/Marion County had an estimated population of 876,804. Of that number 232,607 were below 18 years of age, for a total of 644,197 people in Marion County/Indianapolis 18 or over and thus eligible to vote. (Indiana allows felons to vote as long as they are not incarcerated).

So we have 644,197 people eligible to be registered in Marion County/Indianapolis, and 677,401 people registered. Congratulations go to Indianapolis for having 105% of its residents registered!

Never Yet Melted was contacted by researchers from the Psychology Department at New York University with a request that we assist them in finding politically-sophisticated blog readers to participate in a 2008 election study.

A research team from the Psychology Department at New York University, headed by Professor Yaacov Trope and supported by the National Science Foundation, is investigating the cognitive causes of voting behavior, political preferences, and candidate evaluations throughout the course of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. This stage of the study focuses on the information people use to inform evaluations during the last few weeks before the election. They seek respondents of all political leanings from all over the country (and from the rest of the world) to complete a 15-minute questionnaire, the responses to which will be completely anonymous.

QUESTIONAIRE

Techradar.com discusses the behemoth software maker’s struggle for survival.

Microsoft is still making enormous sums of money, but cracks are appearing in its $16 billion Windows business. The death of XP has been postponed several times – the current rash of ultra-small, ultra-cheap laptops don’t have the horsepower to run Vista – and while Microsoft claims to have sold 180 million Vista licences, many of those licences are for machines running XP.

As Jane Bradburn of HP Australia told reporters in July, “From 30 June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with an XP licence. However, what we have been able to do [is] to ship PCs with a Vista business licence but with XP pre- loaded. That is still the majority of business PCs we are selling today.”

There’s no compelling reason for users to upgrade: Vista requires more powerful hardware than XP, and it’s been plagued by driver problems and incompatibilities. As a result, it’s faced an avalanche of bad publicity – some of it deservedly so, as users found that their devices didn’t work.

The bad publicity isn’t helping enterprise adoption. According to Forrester analyst Ben Gray, “Desktop operations professionals tell Forrester that they see the value in standardising on Vista, but many are having a hard time convincing their CIOs that the move isn’t a risky bet, given the mixed reaction it’s received in the press and the speculation surrounding what to expect after Vista.” Forrester reports that 8.8 per cent of enterprise customers have migrated to Vista; 87 per cent are still running XP.

The ‘mixed reaction’ has been a gift for Apple, whose ‘Mac vs PC’ campaign mocked Microsoft ruthlessly. The ads worked: according to BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman, “More than 50 per cent of customers buying Macs in Apple stores are first time buyers.” ...

So has Microsoft lost it? A company with 93 per cent of the worldwide operating system market, rising revenues, a $60billion turnover and around $22.49billion in operating income is hardly struggling. However, the world in which Microsoft operates is changing dramatically, and Microsoft knows it. ...

Microsoft is fighting back on multiple fronts. It’s “developing versions of our products with basic functionality that are sold at lower prices than standard versions”, but more importantly it’s chucking enormous sums of money at things that may or may not work. ...

To many observers, the way in which Microsoft’s online division is haemorrhaging cash is a sign that Microsoft has missed the boat – but the ‘let’s throw money at this until it works’ approach has worked in the past for Windows, Office, Internet Explorer and Xbox, none of which were immediately successful. Microsoft may not be the leader in search, cloud computing or mobile phones, but the combination of determination and deep pockets is a powerful one.

Hat tip to Meaningless Hot Air.