Here’s an AP video of Hillary (trying to cinch that PA primary) knocking back a shot with a glass of beer in her other hand:

0:58 video

I’d a lot rather watch this form of competition than baseball or football.

Devonport (whatever that is) versus Portsmouth 5:49 video

Hat tip to Theo.

Bird Dog, at Maggie’s Farm, identifies the crucial subtext which has echoed around the entire country.

The reason Obama’s words keep getting so much attention is because they reveal so much of what we already know about how the self-ordained elite think about regular folks. …

Obama gets in trouble whenever he says what he thinks – and either he or his wife do it all the time. They don’t hide it.

Do they think we all live in Berkeley or Cambridge among the bien pensant brie-eaters? (disclaimer: I am known to eat brie.) Hillary is too “smart” and too lacking in conscience to make these sorts of errors of honesty.

I think the story is that Obama’s words have some legs because they expose the old story of the Left’s condescension towards, and sense of superiority in relation to, regular folks. Rush has always contended that the Left refuses to run on their real beliefs, and I think that is true. Truth is, the hard working folks of America are doing fine as long as they live within their means. They have many concerns and interests beyond their bank accounts and whatever freebies they could be entitled to.

And Americans are not babies: they neither long for a government mommy nor do they take politicans’ promises or pandering seriously. They are used to government taking their earnings and offering little in return. Mostly, they want the nanny government to leave them the heck alone. They are, in fact, thinking, responsible, hard-working adults. I know lots of “them,” including myself.

As Mark Levin always says (approx.), “If things are as terrible and hopeless in America as Hillary and Obama say they are, then how come every ambitious and freedom-seeking person in the world wants to come here to pursue their dreams?”

Obama’s political problem is that he is not enough of an impostor to fool the savvy American middle class.

Scrappleface reports on Hillary’s latest populist gesture:

Hillary Totes Bible to Gun Range

(2008-04-13) — Sensing an opportunity to portray Sen. Barack Obama as elitist and out of touch after his remarks about “bitter” rural Americans who cling to guns, God and xenophobia, Sen. Hillary Clinton stopped after church today at an indoor gun range, where she fired roughly 300 rounds through a handgun she said she carries concealed everywhere she goes.

Her lower lip bulging from a dip of Skoal, Sen. Clinton put her Bible in her handbag, and drew out her own Para Ordnance Warthog .45 caliber pistol.

As reporters looked on, the Democrat presidential candidate emptied one 10-round magazine after another, with fair accuracy, at a human silhouette target.

“Small town folk like us,” said Sen. Clinton, “don’t cling to God or guns because we’re bitter about the economy, as my opponent suggests. We believe in God because he’s real, and we keep and bear arms as the best insurance against tyrants who would strip our freedoms if they didn’t fear our collective power.”

Read the whole thing.

General Petraeus has received a lot of the sort of service awards which senior officers accumulate simply as a result of having occupied important posts, but he has also been awarded the Bronze Star (with “V” device signifying it was awarded for valor), presumably in connection with his leading the 101st Airborne in the 2003 drive on Baghdad.

Members of the United States Marine Corps are wont to comment negatively on the abundance of badges and awards displayed by US Army personnel. References to alleged prizes for spelling and deportment are not unusual. But when the kind of badinage normally occurring in the context of interservice rivalries starts coming out of the mouths of liberal sissies who probably flunked their physicals for the local cub scout pack, it is time to be outraged.

First, Matthew DeBord, best-known as a wine writer, in the LA Times, has the temerity to offer General Petraeus fashion advice on how to wear the uniform when delivering testimony to Congress:

Gen. David H. Petraeus may be as impressive a military professional as the United States has developed in recent years, but he could use some strategic advice on how to manage his sartorial PR. Witness his congressional testimony on the state of the war in Iraq. There he sits in elaborate Army regalia, four stars glistening on each shoulder, nine rows of colorful ribbons on his left breast, and various other medallions, brooches and patches scattered across the rest of the available real estate on his uniform. He even wears his name tag, a lone and incongruous hunk of cheap plastic in a region of pristine gilt, just in case the politicians aren’t sure who he is.

That’s a lot of martial bling, especially for an officer who hadn’t seen combat until five years ago. Unfortunately, brazen preening and “ribbon creep” among the Army’s modern-day upper crust have trumped the time-honored military virtues of humility, duty and personal reserve.

This civilian wine expert is obviously unacquainted (probably because the US military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was too upsetting) with the fact that the correct uniform and the display of medals and decorations for various occasions are prescribed. Soldiers do not, in fact, while dressing in the morning, get to reflect, “I’m a bit out-of-sorts today, and don’t feel like getting all dressed up. I think I’ll just wear my fatigues.”

Superannuated television personality Dick Cavett (famous back when the Beatles were the coming thing) emerges from the assisted-living home to bring his 1960s perspective to the matter.

I can’t look at Petraeus — his uniform ornamented like a Christmas tree with honors, medals and ribbons — without thinking of the great Mort Sahl at the peak of his brilliance. He talked about meeting General Westmoreland in the Vietnam days. Mort, in a virtuoso display of his uncanny detailed knowledge — and memory — of such things, recited the lengthy list (”Distinguished Service Medal, Croix de Guerre with Chevron, Bronze Star, Pacific Campaign” and on and on), naming each of the half-acre of decorations, medals, ornaments, campaign ribbons and other fripperies festooning the general’s sternum in gaudy display. Finishing the detailed list, Mort observed, “Very impressive!” Adding, “If you’re twelve.”

There are regrettably some people in this country, so self-obsessed and so utterly removed from reality, that they are able to believe that their own third-rate careers in the entertainment industry place them in a position to sneer at men who have devoted their careers to defending their country, and who have on occasion placed their lives in hazard to preserve this country’s freedom and institutions. If military service and its symbols fail to impress the likes of Mort Sahl and Dick Cavett, that is a reflection on them and not upon the soldiers they have the unmitigated indecency to mock.

Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.

–Kipling

Obama’s San Francisco remarks, attributing the Keystone state’s small town residents’ religious faith and enthusiasm for hunting to bitterness over economic failure, are not winning him a lot of friends in Pennsylvania.

Scranton mayor Chris Doherty responded with an impromptu press conference in Lackawanna County’s Courthouse Square, accompanied by his predecessor in office, local union officials, the mayors of four nearby boroughs, and a visiting New Hampshire state senator, denouncing Obama’s contemptuous analysis.

(Scranton) Times-Tribune:

Former Scranton Mayor Jim Connors said the remarks demean people here as hicks. Mr. Obama wants to transcend stereotypes, but then he stereotyped others, Mr. Connors said.

Standing in front of the John Mitchell statue, Mr. Doherty called hunting a tradition, borne not out of spite but culture and pride. The area’s churches, he said, were built on hopes of improving life and fostering families, not because the population here is downtrodden.

Mr. Doherty pointed to economic growth and investment. He said it’s necessary to combat that negative image.

“That’s not the truth,” he said.

At Mr. Doherty’s side were Mr. Connors and the mayors from Jessup, Taylor, Freeland and Moosic, along with New Hampshire state Sen. Lou D’Allesandro.

Taylor Mayor Richard Bowen said Mr. Obama’s comments hit home beyond Pennsylvania, and he predicts it will cost the senator voters who are on the fence.

Mr. Connors said what most offends him is that Mr. Obama said these things on the other side of the country behind closed doors. Mr. Connors bet Mr. Obama wouldn’t have made such remarks in Altoona.

6:03 video

AP reports that Obama tried apologizing in Winston-Salem:

Obama tried to quell the furor Saturday, explaining his remarks while also conceding he had chosen his words poorly.

“If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said in an interview with the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal.

Those condescending San Francisco remarks were a major misstep. They are going to assure a Clinton victory in Pennsylvania.

I happened to be speaking to a Pennsylvania hunter from Berks County on the telephone yesterday. “Who would ever have imagined,” she marveled, “that Hillary Clinton would become the working man’s candidate in this state? But that’s the way it is. Only rich people and the college professors are for Obama.”

Meanwhile in Indiana, that redneck Hillary, proudly notes her own Scrantonian roots, brandishes her deer rifle, and fondly remembers granddad heading off to work at the mill (just before he gave her a childhood shooting lesson behind the fishing cabin he built with his own hands!). 2:55 video

Rodion Medvedev picks the 13 “most irresponsible” self defense gadgets.

How about a flashlight which doubles as a single-shot .410 shotgun? The catch is: It fires out the rear, so that when you are using it as a flashlight, the business end of the shotgun is pointing in your direction.

Contemporary European culture will be manifested in all its glory later today when a new production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera opens in Erfurt, Germany.

Telegraph:

A German opera house is to unveil a provocative new production staged in the ruins of New York’s World Trade Centre.

It features naked pensioners and Mickey Mouse masks, Hitler salutes and Elvis impersonators.

The self-consciously outrageous September 11th staging of Verdi’s ‘A Masked Ball’ has been dreamed up by Austrian director Johann Kresnik.

He has described the concoction as a populist critique of modern American society, aimed at showing up the disparities between rich and poor, which attracting a large audience.

It will be a different, a provocative masked ball on the ruins of the World Trade Centre,” he told reporters before Saturday’s premiere. “The naked stand for people without means, the victims of capitalism, the underclass, who don’t have anything anymore.”

Rehearsals suggest that Mr Kresnik’s anti-capitalist staging is unlikely to be celebrated for its subtlety.

Some of the cast are dressed in soldiers uniforms, or in the red white and blue of Uncle Sam, or in day-glow pink Elvis costumes, slashed to the waist. Many, however, appear to spend their time on stage not wearing anything at all.

They include dozens local pensioners, recruited by the opera house in Erfurt, eastern Germany, to appear naked wearing nothing but plastic Mickey Mouse masks.

“It’s a very beautiful, poetic scene,” said Guy Montavon, the theatre’s general manager.

He said that 60 eager amateurs were keen to appear naked before an audience for the premiere, but only 35 made the final cut.

The staging deliberately toys with images that are extremely sensitive both in the US and Germany.

Foreign audiences may find naked singers cavorting in front of the iconic ruined mesh of World Trade Centre metalwork most provocative.

In Germany however, a female singer with a painted on toothbrush moustache performing a straight arm Nazi salute appears particularly conceived to outrage.

The original 1859 production of the opera was sadly impacted by Roman censorship, which forced the change of the opera’s setting from 1793 Sweden to colonial Boston, and reduced the rank of the assassinated ruler from king to colonial governor. One has to hand it to Herr Kresnik. He succeeds in making one feel that there is a definite place in Europe these days for some old-time Roman censorship.

Back in the more familiar environs of San Francisco after campaigning in small-town Pennsylvania, a still-shuddering Barack Obama explained the economic basis for the red state malaise of religion, gun ownership, xenophobia, and Republican-voting.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Just a soupçon of federal job-training and economic aid, you see, and all those rednecks will turn in their deer rifles, subscribe to the New Yorker, and suddenly become sensitive to the urgent need for diversity down at the Polish-American Fire House.

Rand Simberg reports directly from “the Alabama of the North.”

I asked around the area, to see how his obvious compassion for Pennsylvanians was viewed. This is just one story, from one man in West Deer Township, but I’m sure that it’s typical.

“By cracky, it’s like the man sees into my soul!

“Thirty years ago, I had a good job in the mill in Pittsburgh. I was bringing in a good income, going to jazz clubs, discussing Proust over white wine and brie, with my gay friends of all colors. I was all for free trade, so that we could sell the steel overseas, and I never bothered to go to church, let alone actually believe in God.

“But then, the plant closed down, and I couldn’t get another job. I went on unemployment, and found odd jobs here and there, but they barely paid the rent in the loft, and the payment on the Bimmer. I couldn’t afford the wine and brie any more, and had to shift over to beer and brats.

“Of course, as a result, I started hanging out with the wrong crowd–the beer drinkers.

“And it wasn’t just the beer. Some of them actually went out in the woods in the fall, and shot animals. And kilt ’em. With real guns!

“I was shocked, of course. For all their diversity, none of my gay friends would have ever thought of doing anything like that. But with my job loss, and lack of money for pedicures and pommade, they didn’t want to hang with me any more. So I borried a twelve gauge over’n’under, and went out with my new beer-drinking animal-killing friends in the woods. And I’ll tell you what, when I shot down that eight-pointer, I felt a sense of power over the helpless in a way that I hadn’t since I’d been looking down on the rednecks when I had that good job in Pittsburgh, driving around town in my 528i.

“But somehow the killing, and hating those two-timing nancy boys wasn’t enough. I was still in despair. I started to search for answers, and I thought that I found them in Jesus. It started small, just church on Sunday, with prayers and a lecture from the preacher.

“But it didn’t stop there. Soon I was attending Wednesday night revivals, and huzzahing and hossanahing, and babbling with the best of them. After a few months I’d graduated to juggling garter snakes, then rattlers.

“But it wasn’t enough. Despite all the gun caressing, and animal killing, and hatred of people who weren’t like me, and anger at the Colombians who were…doing something to me–I’m not entirely sure what, and the tongue speaking and snake handling, I still couldn’t find a job.

“My social life continued to deteriorate. Not only was I no longer interested in those sensitive swishes, or literature, but I was starting to look with lust at my sister. And not just look, I’ll tell you what. She’d been out of work, too, and was getting mighty interested, if you know what I mean.

“I have hit rock bottom.

“Please, help me, O Bama. Forgive me, O Bama. O Bama, my Bama, rescue me from this living hell in which Reagan, and Bush, and Clinton, and Bush, have consigned me. Restore unto me my loft and my teutonic status symbol. Give me back my poofter friends, and my pinot grigio and my baked gruyere, and lattes. Save me from the killing and the beer, and most of all, from Jesus. Save me, O my Bama, and I will commit my vote unto you.

This is just one story of the many lives that Barack Obama has touched, and blessed, this day in the benighted Keystone State. But with his obvious compassion, and ability to feel the pain of others so unlike him, he is sure to carry the state in a couple weeks.

Ace summarizes Obama’s campaign message to small-town residents of the Keystone State:

Obama To Rural Pennsylvanians: Vote For Me, You Corncob-Smokin’, Banjo-Strokin’ Chicken-Chokin’ Cousin-Pokin’ Inbred Hillbilly Racist Morons

And compiles reactions:

Of course Obama is wrong. Rural Pennsylvanians loved their guns, hated foreigners and minorities and used religion as a front for their hatred loooong before the mills closed.

London Times:

The secret site where Iran is suspected of developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching targets in Europe has been uncovered by new satellite photographs.

The imagery has pinpointed the facility from where the Iranians launched their Kavoshgar 1 “research rocket” on February 4, claiming that it was in connection with their space programme.

Analysis of the photographs taken by the Digital Globe QuickBird satellite four days after the launch has revealed a number of intriguing features that indicate to experts that it is the same site where Iran is focusing its efforts on developing a ballistic missile with a range of about 6,000km (4,000 miles).

A previously unknown missile location, the site, about 230km southeast of Tehran, and the link with Iran’s long-range programme, was revealed by Jane’s Intelligence Review after a study of the imagery by a former Iraq weapons inspector. A close examination of the photographs has indicated that the Iranians are following the same path as North Korea, pursuing a space programme that enables Tehran to acquire expertise in long-range missile technology. …

according to Jane’s Intelligence Review, the satellite photographs prove that the Kavoshgar 1 rocket was not part of a civilian space centre project but was consistent with Iran’s clandestine programme to develop longer-range missiles.

The examination of the launch site revealed that it was part of a large and growing complex “with very high levels of security and recent construction activity”. It was clearly “an important strategic facility”, Dr Forden said.

The former Iraq weapons inspector said that Iran was benefiting from the North Korean missile programme and following its designs.

It will not be terribly long before the Iranian mullahs will be able to subject the countries of Europe to nuclear blackmail. If either democrat should win the upcoming Fall Presidential Election, or should the democrat party merely secure a veto-proof majority in Congress, the ABM missile-shield proposed by the Bush Administration for installation in Central Europe is sure to be cancelled. The European interest in the American election will be much greater than many Europeans realize.

This 9:53 video quotes Barack Hussein Obama reading the audio book version of his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, and his pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, on racial attitudes, providing an interesting comparison to the sentiments expressed in his more recent (presidential campaign period) Philadelphia speech.

Obama supporters will try to say that it’s just a partisan attack piece, but when his opponents have simply taken the words out of the candidate’s own mouth, they are not so easily dismissed.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

The MSM and the blogosphere has moved on from unimportant subjects like Islamic terrorism and the upcoming presidential election to what really matters: Is that really a babe reflected in Dick Cheney’s fishing shades?

McClatchy:

Since Wednesday, the blogosphere has been atwitter over a photograph on the White House Web site of Cheney with a caption that said he was fly-fishing on the Snake River in Idaho.

The photo is a tight shot of Cheney’s face sporting dark sunglasses and his trademark grin.

What’s stirring all the buzz is the reflection in the vice president’s dark glasses. Some thought that the reflection looked like a naked woman and, this being Cheney and this being the Internet Age, they immediately shared that thought with the world.

In a Google search for the words “Dick Cheney” and “sunglasses,” 79,300 hits came back at mid-afternoon on Thursday. By 7 p.m., the count was 130,000.

On DemocraticUnderground.com, the discussion starts with this question: “Notice anything … interesting … reflected in his sunglasses? Something that has little to do with conventional ‘fly-fishing’?”

Photographers discuss.