Ben Smith identifies a hundred eighty degree policy reversal made by Joe Biden in one 72-hour period.

Some great rope line video from Joe Biden’s recent Ohio swing, where he was asked by an anti-pollution campaigner about clean coal—a controversial approach in Democratic circles for which Obama has voiced support, particularly during the Kentucky primary.

Biden’s apparent answer: He supports clean coal for China, but not for the United States.

“No coal plants here in America,” he said. “Build them, if they’re going to build them, over there. Make them clean.”

“We’re not supporting clean coal,” he said of himself and Obama. They do, on paper, support clean coal.

The answer seems to play into John McCain’s case that Obama has been saying “no” to new sources of energy.

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Today, Senator John McCain pounced on Biden’s remarks.

“I am going to put in place the priorities and policies that will create jobs in Ohio. One important way that we are going to create jobs here is with the development of additional nuclear plants and through investments in clean coal technology,” he said. “[Obama’s] running mate here in Ohio recently said that they weren’t supporting clean coal.”

Biden spokesman David Wade responded by calling McCain’s statement “yet another false attack from a dishonorable campaign.”

He continued: “Senator McCain knows that Senator Obama and Senator Biden support clean coal technology. Senator Biden’s point is that China is building coal plants with outdated technology every day, and the United States needs to lead by developing clean coal technologies.”

But the error here does seem to be Biden’s, and his remarks, and his apparent return to his primary position Tuesday, were striking because just three days ago, he praised the possibilities of coal to a crowd at the United Mine Workers of America annual fish fry in Castlewood, Va.

“You know we have enough coal in the United States of America to meet out needs domestically for the better part of the next hundred to 200 years,” Biden said before launching into a critique of McCain’s energy priorities, slamming his support for billions in tax breaks for oil companies as the industry rakes in record profits.

“Imagine … what Barack and I can do taking that $4 billion … and investing it in coal gasification, finding out what we can do with carbon sequestration, finding out how we can burn the coal that you dig that can free us from being dependent on foreign oil countries and at the same time not ruin the environment. That’s within our capacity to do it, if you give me $4 billion I promise you, I promise you we will find the answer,” Biden said.

He linked the ticket’s support for coal with their call to have U.S. automakers produce plug-in electric cars. “Where’s that [electricity] come from? That comes from a utility. What do utilities burn? They burn coal mostly.”

Southwest Virginia UMWA members are just too dumb to notice what he says in a different state, Biden obviously surmises.

Michael Graham, at the Boston Herald, addresses democrats denying the obvious.

Let’s start with the obvious and inarguable: Of course Sen. Barack Obama’s comment about “lipstick on a pig” was a reference to Supergirl Sarah Palin.

You know it, I know it and the partisan crowd that literally rose to their feet and cheered when they heard it knew it.

And it’s nothing new. Democrats shot the lipstick line at Gov. Palin on their official Web site last week with a posting entitled “McCain’s Selection of Palin is Lipstick on a Pig” – accompanied by what I’m sure was intended to be a flattering photo of the Alaska outdoorswoman.

And – coincidence or something more? – the same day Obama made his crack, a Democratic congressman introducing Joe Biden said of Sarah Palin, “There’s no way you can dress up her record, even with a lot of lipstick.”

If there was anyone in the audience still too dense to get it – say, an employee of CNN, perhaps – Obama immediately followed up with a reference to the McCain/Palin campaign wrapping “an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change.’ ”

A lipstick-wearing pig and an old fish? Gee, who could he possibly be talking about?

So please, my Obama-supporting friends, let’s stop the nonsense about how Obama’s lipstick talk was, as he put it yesterday, an “innocent comment,” or that the reaction is “phony outrage.” ...

Smart people are asking why Obama would do something so dumb. He couldn’t have meant to say it, they argue, because he had to know it would exacerbate his biggest political problem – women voters abandoning the Democratic ticket.

I agree. This wasn’t a political plot. It was a Barack Obama point of personal privilege.

What we’re seeing is how Barack Obama performs under pressure. And so far, it isn’t pretty.

I believe Obama knows it, which is why I believe he indulged that moment of unbecoming snarkiness on Tuesday. He did the same thing back in April when, during a speech about Hillary’s attacks, he carefully “scratched” his face with his middle finger. And, then as now, the crowd picked up on his digital communications.

Obama is frustrated. He’s cranky. He was on his way to a coronation and now finds himself in a catfight that, so far, he’s losing.

And so the Obama team is lashing out. The same day they started the “lipstick” meme, Democrats sent out 12 press releases attacking the bottom of the GOP ticket.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama campaign has “airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers” into Alaska, all to deal with the Palin problem.

Obama’s poll numbers keep sinking, his fundraising is flat. And there isn’t a Swift Boat in sight.

Just a hockey mom with a bachelor’s degree, who has brought the great and powerful Obama to his knees.

A lot of my liberal classmates were going on, in their snobbish Ivy League way, about how the great Obamessiah wrote his own speeches, but that dumb Sarah Palin, who went to an infra dig school that wasn’t Yale or Harvard, needed to have her acceptance speech written for her.

Well, as Erick Erickson reports:

Halfway through Sarah Palin’s speech tonight at the RNC, people following the speech noticed she was deviating from the prepared text.

According to sources close to the McCain campaign, the teleprompter continued scrolling during applause breaks. As a result, half way through the speech, the speech had scrolled significantly from where Governor Palin was in the speech. The malfunction also occurred during Rudy Giuliani’s speech, explaining his significant deviations from his speech.

Unfazed, Governor Palin continued, from memory, to deliver her speech without the teleprompter cued to the appropriate point in her speech.

Palin did just fine.

But look how well that really, really smart Obama did when placed in the same inconvenient situation.

1:13 video
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Also today, Jonathan Martin disagrees about Palin winging it.

Perhaps there were moments where it scrolled slightly past her exact point in the speech. But I was sitting in the press section next to the stage, within easy eyeshot of the Teleprompter. I frequently looked up at the machine, and there was no serious malfunction. A top convention planner confirms this morning that there were no major problems.

Is he merely quibbling? I don’t know how common it is for teleprompters to run past the point speakers have reached myself, and I don’t think it’s possible to determine which of the witnesses is correct on this one.

Jake Tapper explains how after winning the election by campaigning in all 57 states, Barack Obama plans to be ready to govern for 8 to 10 years.

Today on CBS’s Face the Nation, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in Afghanistan, told the paparazzi-pursued correspondent Lara Logan that “the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years.

“And it’s important for me to have a relationship with them early, that I start listening to them now, getting a sense of what their interests and concerns are.”

The notion that Obama will be dealing with world leaders for eighjt-to-ten years, possibly up through July 2018, suggests that either (a) he believes that not only will he be elected and re-elected, but the 22nd amendment will be repealed and he will be elected for a third term, OR (b) he was speaking casually and just meant two terms.

(I’m guessing b.)

Maybe the presidency in Kenya has a ten year term.

That political genius Barack Obama tells a Georgia crowd that they should be teaching their kids to speak Spanish, instead of worrying about immigrants learning English. And he then explains how embarrassing it is to people like himself to live among all those dumbass Americans who don’t speak lots of languages like the sophisticated Europeans do.

B. Hussein says:

Understand this: instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English—they’ll learn English!—you need to make sure that your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. Yo! It’s embarrassing… it’s embarrassing when… when… uh, Europeans come over here. they all speak English. They speak French. They speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and… and all we’s can say is “Merci beaucoup.”

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Oh yes, this one will win lots of support from those bitter gun-owners and church-goers in the Heartland, alright.

I bet they’re pulling out their hair at Obama campaign headquarters.

Unless he’s completely rested and prepared and working off a script on a teleprompter, Barack Obama is every bit as much of a disaster as Michelle.

Yes, learning languages is a good thing, but we have plenty of language education available in America right now. People like B Hussein Obama, who attended exclusive preparatory schools and Harvard, and who jet off regularly to Barcelona, Paris, and Gstaad, do almost invariably speak some other languages.

Ordinary, working class Americans (surprise, surprise!) actually commonly cannot afford European vacations, and have a whole lot less use than Europeans, who live next door to countries speaking them, do for foreign languages. If France was right across the Missouri River from Iowa, I expect most people in Sioux City would know how to read a menu in French. Spanish biligualism is actually pretty common right now in the US of A around the Mexican border.

The issue that bugs people is the way the system bends over backwards to accomodate foreign languages like Spanish, discouraging assimilation and inconveniencing ordinary Americans. When I use the ATM machine at the local supermarket, I have to choose a language before I can transact my business. The burden ought to go the other way. The immigrant ought to have to figure out how to deal with English language ATM machines. The inconvenience is minor, it’s true, but the symbolism is annoying. One feels that the normal American’s English language has been demoted from its formerly established position to the status of just another of the tongues of Babel.

Obama has yet again given a very effective demonstration of his elite perspective and his contempt for, and inability to understand or sympathize with, the lives of ordinary Americans.

The Republican National Committee observes that Obama’s Memorial Day speech featured a really big problem with historical fact.

I had an uncle who was one of the—who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps. And the story in our family was is that when he came home, he just went up into the attic and he didn’t leave the house for six months. Right, now, obviously, something had really affected him deeply. But at that time, there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

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As Wikipedia explains: Aushwitz was liberated by the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army on January 27 1945.

But, his making mistakes on these kinds of details was understandable, after all, as he notes at the very opening of his Memorial Day speech, on Monday Obama was seeing dead people, so he was naturally a bit agitated.

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes—and I see many of them in the audience here today—our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

9:20 video

Fox News Contributor Liz Trotta tops Hillary.

Editor and Publisher:

Appearing on Fox News today, Liz Trotta, a former editor with the Washington Times and reporter the Chicago Tribune and Newsday, was asked by the host, Eric Shawn, about the Clinton controversy and the 2008 race. This led Trotta to refer to the Clinton misstep, in which she mentioned the RFK killing to show (the candidate later claimed) that previous campaigns, like the current one, went into June.

Trotta, according to video, replied, “And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, uh Obama. Well, both, if we could.” She laughed.

The host, Shawn, clearly understanding how far she had gone, quickly commented: “Talk about how you really feel.”

Then he continued: “But do you really think that—she didn’t mean that she thinks that he going to get assassinated, and she apologized—
Trotta: “Well, that’s beside the point, whether she meant it or not.”

Shawn: “And she’s just using it in a historical context?”

Trotta: “She’s tone deaf, because it’s a radioactive word. And the whole question of the first black man becoming a candidate for presidency of the United States has all kinds of overtones and all kinds of caveats that really have to be considered in this thing. And his security has been a real issue. He’s had bodyguards earlier than anybody else. Surely this woman had to know that that was a third rail to say ‘assassination.’ And it’s hard to argue for her on this, because it isn’t the first time she’s made this step.”

3:23 video

Early this month, Barack Obama said that, over 15 months, he’d campaigned… (thinking about it)... in all 57 states.

A week later, he confused Sioux Falls (South Dakota) with Sioux City (Iowa).

Last Friday, Obama continued his pattern of confusion, repeatedly referring to the name of the Florida city, Sunrise, he was visiting, as “Sunshine.”

Also, in Florida on the same Friday, while addressing the Cuban American National Foundation,

Since the Bush Administration launched a misguided war in Iraq, its policy in the Americas has been negligent toward our friends, ineffective with our adversaries, disinterested in the challenges that matter in peoples’ lives, and incapable of advancing our interests in the region. No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum.

Hugo Chavez was, of course, elected president of Venezuela December 6, 1998, while William Jefferson Clinton was in the White House.

32:15 video (Chavez comment appears at 2:50)

Earlier in his Miami speech, Obama cast his own background (17th century WASP colonist plus politically-prominent Kenyan) as similar to that of Cuban refugees from Castro’s tyranny, his Kenyan father as a poor immigrant seeking the American Dream of Freedom and Opportunity.

0:33 in the video:

Miami’s promise of Liberty and opportunity has drawn generations of immigrants to these shores, sometimes with nothing more than the clothes on their back. And I was talking to Jorge
about his father, and the story… the immigrant story that he embodies, and his family embodies, and the extraordinary success… That is the story of America. It was the similar hope that drew my father across an ocean in search of the same promise.

Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. didn’t come to America seeking Liberty and Opportunity. He was sent to America as part of a program created by Kenyan Black Nationalist leader Tom Mboya
to obtain Western educations for future Kenyan government leaders and officials. After he attended the University of Hawaii, bigamously married Stanley Ann Dunham, abandoned her and his son and went to Harvard, he returned to Kenya with yet another American wife, where he took up an economist’s position in a government ministry.

Obama Senior had obviously never intended to work or settle in the United States, so he was hardly an immigrant “drawn across an ocean” by the Land of Opportunity. And Obama Sr. was hardly an admirer of Liberty, being a Marxist. His government career in Kenya stalled and he grew bitter, it is reported, after he published an incendiary paper taking the pro-Communist side against the Kenyatta government.

Compare the absence of coverage the MSM of all these errors and an impressive falsehood, with the microscopic and obsessive coverage of the public statements of Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

H/t to Noel Sheppard and )”>Charles Johnson.

He tells an audience in Oregon.

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