A McCain campaign sticker on a car is enough to provoke road-rage in LA, Judy Gruen testifies.

Hours after I slapped a McCain bumper sticker on my car, somebody tore it off in the parking lot of a local courthouse. No problem; I had bought a pack of ten and replaced it when I got home. I laughed when I thought that whoever had done it probably claims to support “diversity.”

Perhaps it was the shock of seeing a McCain sticker in very blue Los Angeles, where such sightings were rare, that caused the individual to rip it off. I had certainly seen very, very few, and not a single McCain lawn sign. Meanwhile, Obama bumper stickers seem to be standard equipment on every Prius in the land. Yes, I was feeling every bit the lonely Republican.

About a week later, I also felt scared. While driving in my neighborhood one afternoon, I was suddenly distracted by the sight of the driver behind me, threateningly close on my tail. She was screaming and was very clearly thrusting the finger at me. (You know, the rude one.) She alternated this gesture with making an “M” with her other fingers, and jabbing them as well.

I knew I had not cut into her lane or violated any other rules-of-the-road etiquette. I could come to only one conclusion: my McCain sticker was causing road rage! I was consoled by the fact that, as an extreme liberal, she probably didn’t have a gun on her. On the other hand, she seemed dangerous, and I wanted an exit strategy faster than the one Obama wants for Iraq. I pulled over as soon as I could to let her pass and get to her anger management session, but instead of speeding away from me and my odious political convictions, she pulled up alongside of me, still screaming and gesturing. I pretended to look impassive, but by the time she finally drove off, emitting more than just greenhouse gasses, she wasn’t the only one who needed calming down

Not super funny, but Fey does imitate the governor’s vocal mannerisms perfectly.

5:10 video

Another class act from Huffington Post: the screenwriter of the preachy agitprop box-office bomb North Country*, Michael Seiztman heard Sarah Palin in her ABC interview choose the George W. Bush-preferred pronunciation of nuclear, and proceeded to go ballistic on all you Americans who fail to measure up to his personal standards of pronunciation, deportment, and political correctness.

*Budget $30,000,000 — Gross revenue $23,624,242

Repent immediately, or else!

I realized three things tonight. For one, if you are a McCain/Palin/Bush voter, you and I do not have a difference of opinion. We have a difference in brain power. Two, she really is as ignorant as I feared. And, three, she really is kinda hot. Basically, I want to have sex with her on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads aloud from the Constitution. (My wife is cool with this if I promise to “first wipe off Palin’s tranny makeup.” I married well.)

Now, I want to be clear and speak directly to those of you who LOVED that Palin interview. You’re an idiot. I mean that. This is not one of those cases where we’re going to agree to disagree. This isn’t one of those situations where we debate it passionately and then walk away thinking that the other guy is wrong but argued well. I’m not going to think of you as a thoughtful but misguided person with different ideas who still really cares about the country and the world. No, sorry, not this time. This time, if you watched those interview excerpts and weren’t scared out of your freakin’ mind, then you’re mentally ill, mentally disabled, or mentally disturbed. What you are NOT is responsible, informed, curious, thoughtful, mature, educated, empathetic, or remotely serious. I mean it.

But I like to think that anyone can change.

Stop voting for people you want to have a beer with. Stop voting for folksy. Stop voting for people who remind you of your neighbor. Stop voting for the ideologically intransigent, the staggeringly ignorant, and the blazingly incompetent.

Vote for someone smarter than you. Vote for someone who inspires you. Vote for someone who has not only traveled the world but who has also shown a deep understanding and compassion for it. The stakes are real and they’re terrifyingly high. This election matters. It matters. It really matters. Let me say that one more time. This. Really. Matters.

Face it, Seitzman, George W. Bush graduated from three better schools than you did.

We live in a tragic age, in which control of far too great a portion of the arts is in the hands of witless vulgarians, like Seitzman, who respond to the quirks of fate allowing pseudo-intellectual clods like themselves too near the center of the stage with complacent self-infatuation and Neronian fantasies of the exercise of political power.

I’ve rarely seen a blog post which demonstrated, so definitively, its author’s complete lack of the supposed superiority which forms the entire basis of his diatribe.

Carel Brest van Kempen and friend

An August 25 WSJ article blamed a management plan by outside environmentalists which prevented feeding of komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) by residents of Kampang Komodo for the large monitor lizard’s increased opportunism and aggression, and for occasional incidents of human predation.

We don’t want the Komodo dragon to be domesticated. It’s against natural balance,” says Widodo Ramono, policy director of the Nature Conservancy’s Indonesian branch and a former director of the country’s national park service. “We have to keep this conservation area for the purpose of wildlife. It is not for human beings.”

This sounded like a good story to me and I blogged it here.

On the other hand, I have since found via Steve Bodio, that Carel Brest van Kempen, a Nature artist who knows his Oras as well as the local area, has a very different perspective, and makes a persuasive case contradicting the WSJ.

Mr. van Kempen says the village traces its origin to a penal colony, was settled by piratical Bugis fisherman from Sulawesi (whose ancestors were so naughty, he alleges, they inspired the English term “bogeymen”). The village has grown to 1600 residents, and Mr. van Kempen disapproves. “An unchecked human explosion will doom the dragons, ” he believes. Drastic measures were imposed by a 25-year plan drafted by outside experts. Mr. van Kempen endorses that plan, considering it “a thoughtful and practical attempt at a rather Sisyphean task.”

That Sisyphean task is obviously keeping the ora habitat free of local settlements.

The Management Plan bans a number of destructive and effective fishing methods, including explosives and poisons, reef gleaning, long lines, gill nets and demersal (bottom) traps, effectively restricting fishermen to using hook and line and traditional light nets. It also imposes catch limits and denies access to grouper and Napoleon Wrasse spawning grounds. A long list of fish species is proscribed, as are all marine invertebrates except squid. Some rather Draconian measures have been taken on land. All immigration has been disallowed; not even marriage confers a right to residency in the Park. Dogs and cats have been banned, as have most other domestic animals save goats and chickens, and restrictions have been put on use of fresh water. The gathering of firewood is no longer allowed and the laws prohibiting hunting of deer, pigs and buffalo are being strictly enforced. It’s the fishing restrictions, though, that have impacted the already struggling villagers the hardest, and they’ve caused considerable anger. There have been shootouts between rangers and fishermen, resulting in several deaths. Balancing the needs of the burgeoning villagers and those of the finite ecosystem is difficult, and the fact that it’s being imposed from outside causes real resentments.

If one actually reads the plan, one is obliged to conclude that the poor ignorant villagers, persons of low education who thoughtlessly reproduce themselves and get in the way of ecological progress are being first prevented from fishing by the most effective techniques and for the most marketable catch. Meanwhile, a totalitarian regime regulating intimate details of daily life (Don’t spray pesticides! How much water are you using? No dogs or cats, or wives from off-island, either!) must make things unpleasant indeed for residents, who are clearly being not all that subtly nudged to pack up and go away.

Once they’re gone, in comes the multi-million-dollar beach resort for eco-tourism, offering reef snorkling and dragon watching for beaucoup dollars per diem.

Steve Bodio and Matt Mullinex were dazzled by the details that van Kempen throws around, and by his obvious personal acquaintance with the neighborhood. I’m not persuaded. I remain permanently suspicious of Sarastro and all his expert planners, and on the basis of habitual preference for underdogs, I remain on the side of those local fishermen who are clearly getting pushed around.

The oras will clearly make out. The Indonesian government can make a good buck selling glimpses of this kind of unique wildlife to tourists, so they’ll be well protected.

No retraction from me.

Bruce Heiden, who teaches Classics at Ohio State and is blogging as PostLiberal, explains how the McCain campaign’s fuss over the Obama “lipstick on a pig” remark wasn’t simply whining, but a kind of tactical campaign parody designed to highlight political correctness in general to the disadvantage of the democrat candidate.

The reason Team McCain went whiny this week, I believe, is that they saw in Obama’s “pig” remark an opportunity to smoke out an issue that is very important to the Obama campaign and indeed to the nation at this time. The issue is neither sexism nor offensive speech. The issue is Political Correctness. Political Correctness is the Donkey In The Room in the 2008 Presidential campaign, because Political Correctness is both the sole rationale for Barack Obama’s candidacy (as an alternative to, say, Hillary Clinton’s) and an issue that he alone of the candidates can claim. …

All throughout the spring, as political operatives and experts who had declared Obama inevitable tried to deny that Hillary Clinton had put him on the ropes, we heard in interviews about the supposed “difficulty” of running against Barack Obama. For most citizens this commentary was “analysis,” but for John McCain it was business of the most practical sort, because unlike the rest of us John McCain is in the unique position of actually running against Obama, and if there is a difficulty involved in running against Obama one of McCain’s fundamental tasks is to overcome it. If he doesn’t, he will lose.

So what was the difficulty of running against Obama supposed to be? What it amounted to was this: the public, or anyway all of it living in cafes instead of caves, allegedly felt a certain adoration of Obama that had nothing in particular to do with “issues”; and therefore the public did not want to hear Obama criticized on the issues, not to mention on other grounds. The basis for the public’s alleged love affair with Obama was not exclusively his ethnicity, but more importantly his charm, seriousness, and potential to inaugurate an era of racial harmony devoutly to be wished. Obama was, in short, No Ordinary Candidate, and an ordinary opponent foolish enough to treat Obama like an ordinary candidate would find–or so the experts predicted–that all arguments against Obama would rebound fatally upon the opponents, because the public did not want to hear Obama brought down to the level of ordinary politicians. If anyone tried it, the public would think–indeed, the public would realize–that the opponent was opposing not just a candidate but the bright future of racial harmony itself. And anyone who would do that might well be a racist, especially since the candidate they were so unfairly opposing was African-American.

Hence, according to the commentators, campaigning against Obama would be “difficult” for a politician to do. What they really meant is that it would be impossible, and that they would make it so, because in “doing their jobs” as journalists and expert commentators they would have the solemn responsibility of enforcing rules of discourse that would fix the campaigning in Obama’s favor and deprive the American voters of an open democratic discussion and freely made decision.

The fundamental task confronting a candidate running against Obama, therefore, is simply that of asserting the people’s right to have a campaign, instead of the parade the Obamacrats had concluded was their entitlement. Obama’s opponent must establish the democratic right to say out loud that the Emperor has no clothes, and to establish the right of the people to hear it, whether they want to or not; because that, Norman Lear, is the American Way. Moreover some voters do want to hear it, and others who think they don’t will be glad to have the alternative perspective once they have the chance. McCain has already changed minds in this election, but to do it he had to violate the speech code. The offensive words that sounded like drills in the ears of liberals were these: “Sarah Palin.” Among the other things liberals said about her, they said that McCain had offended women merely by putting her on the ticket. Now that’s what I would call hypersensitivity, if I didn’t know how disingenuous it really was.

Yes, Team McCain is disingenuous in slamming Obama over sexism, but precisely this transparent disingenuousnesss makes their real charge against Obama stronger instead of weaker, because the charge is that of trying to win the Presidency by imposing upon the campaigns a speech code that would shield Obama from legitimate and tough criticism. McCain’s issue here is not sexism but Political Correctess, and disingenuousness is constitutive of Political Correctness, which could be defined as disingenuous allegations that feelings have been injured by insensitive (i.e. unintentionally offensive) speech or conduct. Team McCain’s whining is a caricature of PC, but it will stick to Obama and not McCain, because everybody already knows that Obama’s campaign has been powered by PC since day one and would ride it to the White House if allowed. The Obamacrats don’t like finger pointing? Look who’s talking!

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Daniel Lowenstein.

Financial Times:

Democratic jitters about the US presidential race have spread to Capitol Hill, where some members of Congress are worried that Barack Obama’s faltering campaign could hurt their chances of re-election.

Party leaders have been hoping to strengthen Democratic control of the House and Senate in November, but John McCain’s jump in the polls has stoked fears of a Republican resurgence.

A Democratic fundraiser for Congressional candidates said some planned to distance themselves from Mr Obama and not attack Mr McCain.

“If people are voting for McCain it could help Republicans all the way down the ticket, even in a year when the Democrats should be sweeping all before us,” said the fundraiser, a former Hillary Clinton supporter.

“There is a growing sense of doom among Democrats I have spoken to . . . People are going crazy, telling the campaign ‘you’ve got to do something’.”

Concern was greatest among first-term representatives who won seats in traditionally Republican districts in the landslide of 2006. “Several of them face a real fight to hold on to those seats,” the fundraiser said.

Tony Podesta, a senior Democratic lobbyist, said members of Congress were “a little nervous” after Mr McCain shook up the race with his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate and intensified attacks on Mr Obama.

“Republicans have been on the offensive for the past two weeks . . . You don’t win elections on the defensive.”

The campaign manager for a first-term Democratic congressman from a blue-collar district in the north-east rejected suggestions that Mr Obama had become a liability. He said his candidate would reach out to Republicans and avoid attacks on Mr McCain.

There is this rumbling in the ground, cracks can be seen on the surface of the hillside, is it possible? Can democrats who nominated the most leftwing member of the Senate be facing yet another massive public rejection and Republican landslide?

CBS News interviews former Hillary campaign strategist Mark Penn:

CBSNews.com: Your former colleague Howard Wolfson argued that you all unintentionally paved the way for Palin by exposing some of the unfair media coverage that Hillary Clinton received. And, therefore, a lot of the media may now be treating Sarah Palin with kid gloves. Do you agree with that?

Mark Penn: Well, no, I think the people themselves saw unfair media coverage of Senator Clinton. I think if you go back, the polls reflected very clearly what “Saturday Night Live” crystallized in one of their mock debates about what was happening with the press.

I think here the media is on very dangerous ground. I think that when you see them going through every single expense report that Governor Palin ever filed, if they don’t do that for all four of the candidates, they’re on very dangerous ground. I think the media so far has been the biggest loser in this race. And they continue to have growing credibility problems.

And I think that that’s a real problem growing out of this election. The media now, all of the media — not just Fox News, that was perceived as highly partisan — but all of the media is now being viewed as partisan in one way or another. And that is an unfortunate development.

CBSNews.com: So you think the media is being uniquely tough on Palin now?

Mark Penn: Well, I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates. And that’s going to subject them to people concluding that they’re giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, “Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time.”

What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them.

Can they possibly lose any more credibility than they have already?

Those loveable clowns Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld are back. This time intruding on a suburban family in order “to connect with real people.” Our heroes, as Seinfeld explains to Gates, have a problem with being “a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic.”

4:30 video

Mildly amusing, at least in parts, but still completely and utterly irrelevant to competition from Mac and Linux, or the merits of Vista as an operating system (or the lack thereof). The complacent condescension of the great men’s self-referential exercise is beginning to wear thin.

———————-

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Attacking John McCain as so 1980s with the 0:31 ad accusing him of being unable to send an email.

If I were Rick Davis and managing John McCain’s campaign, I’d whip up an ad showing McCain beating a couple of youthful geeks in a computer game. Hint: Spore just came out.

This McCain 0:31 campaign ad uses Obama campaign attacks on Sarah Palin as its theme.

Not tightly focused or pointed enough, in my opinion, but it glances over some effective memes.

According to the New York Times, last July, President Bush for the first time authorized US special forces ground incursions into Pakistan without the authorization of the Pakistani government.

PressTV reports big talk from the turban-wearing set:

The Pakistani Army has been given orders to retaliate against any unilateral strike by the Afghanistan-based US troops inside the country.

Army Spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas confirmed the orders in a brief interview with Geo News on late Thursday night.

The decision was made on the first day of the two-day meeting of Pakistan’s top military commanders to discuss the US coalition’s ground and air assault in Waziristan region which killed dozens of civilians.

Army Chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani chaired the meeting which began in Rawalpindi on Thursday at the Army General Headquarters.

Pakistan’s military commanders expressed their determination to defend the country’s borders without allowing any external forces to conduct operations inside the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, sources said. …

The development also brought into the open the increasing mistrust between the Americans and the Pakistanis over how to handle the Taliban and al-Qaeda linked militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Some political expert predict the break out of an all-out war between the United States troops and Pakistani army following the Bush administration’s approval of ground and air assaults inside the country.

They’ll be sorry if they try.

Legendary White Crane-style Kung Fu Master Pei Mei, it is said, killed twelve fully-armed Shaolin monks using only the blade from his broken pencil sharpener.

South Carolina Low Country Island Packet has a story indicating that the Zero Common Sense policies associated with America’s bed-wetting, nincompoop haute bourgeoisie have spread even to within a stone’s throw of the US Marine Corps’s recruit training depot at Parris Island.

A 10-year-old Hilton Head Island boy has been suspended from school for having something most students carry in their supply boxes: a pencil sharpener.

The problem was his sharpener had broken, but he decided to use it anyway.

A teacher at Hilton Head Island International Baccalaureate Elementary School noticed the boy had what appeared to be a small razor blade during class on Tuesday, according to a Beaufort County sheriff’s report.

It was obvious that the blade was the metal insert commonly found in a child’s small, plastic pencil sharpener, the deputy noted.

The boy — a fourth-grader described as a well-behaved and good student — cried during the meeting with his mom, the deputy and the school’s assistant principal.

He had no criminal intent in having the blade at school, the sheriff’s report stated, but was suspended for at least two days and could face further disciplinary action.

District spokesman Randy Wall said school administrators are stuck in the precarious position between the district’s zero tolerance policy against having weapons at school and common sense.

“We’re always going to do something to make sure the child understands the seriousness of having something that could potentially harm another student, but we’re going to be reasonable,” he said.

Pious blithering letter to parents from school dated 9/11.

Police report (!). These idiots actually called the police over this!

Principal McAden “clarified” today, defending the school’s insanity and asserting that the child was “not suspended for having a pencil sharpener. He had an exposed blade which created a dangerous setting for the student and other children. The student was suspended for one day for inappropriate behavior in the classroom.”

Dangerous? Maybe a legendary martial artist could do something effective with a weapon of the sort (especially in the Hong Kong cinema), but an elementary school kid is going to do what with a marginally-edged one inch piece of metal?