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Thursday, August 14th 2008, 8:13 PM
Michael Goodwin
nydailynews.com

Hillary Clinton may not get her party’s nomination, but her roll call at the convention means she’s stealing the show from its presumtive star, Barack Obama.

Russia rolls over Georgia, Hillary Clinton does the same to Barack Obama. Now we know who’s boss.

Obama blinked and stands guilty of appeasing Clinton by agreeing to a roll call vote for her nomination. That he might not have had much choice if he wanted peace only proves the point that he’s playing defense at his own convention.

What does he get out of it? Not much and not for long.

The fleeting sense that he is a magnanimous nominee won’t get him a single vote he wouldn’t get anyway. Ditto for the idea that he’s going the extra mile to unify the party. Those who refuse to accept him as the legitimate winner aren’t likely to do so just because he caves into her demands.

It makes him look weak and ratifies Clinton’s sense of entitlement to share party leadership and the convention spotlight.

It was supposed to be his party. Now it’s theirs. His and hers.

The substantive problem for Obama is that he is already underperforming against John McCain. He limped across the finish line in the primaries and, since Clinton conceded in June, his poll numbers have flat-lined.

In the face of that lackluster showing, his choices have been curious. The time spent in Europe and now in Hawaii might have been better spent courting the white, working-class voters who have proved immune to his charms.

Trying to bring them into the tent by agreeing to Clinton’s growing demands is a poor substitute for direct appeals. She might not be able to deliver them, even if she tries.

Yet already the list of what Hillary wants and what Hillary gets is unprecedented for somebody who lost the nomination. She gets a prime-time address where she will be introduced by daughter Chelsea. She gets her own team to produce a hagiographic video of her.

Hubby Bubba gets a prime-time speech on Wednesday night. And Hillary gets a platform plank that uses “glass ceiling” language right out of her speech to suggest she would be the nominee if not for sexism.

A few more big-ticket items and she’ll be the co-nominee. Maybe that’s the point.

It reminds me of a Cold War joke about how the Russians view a compromise. They come to the table and announce the rules: What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.

How would President Obama respond?

I think we just found out.

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
August 6, 2008; Page A13
Wall Street Journal Online

Boone Pickens may be a fine man, and has played a colorful and useful role on the American stage for decades. But his “energy plan,” which he’s spending a fortune to promote on cable TV, is not a plan.

Asserting that something would be good to do is not “a plan.” Saying how to do it is “a plan.” By this standard, what the legendary oil man is devoting $58 million to pitch hardly amounts to a decent slogan.

He would replace natural gas in electricity production with wind, and use the natural gas to power cars. He fails to mention any practical theory of how to get there — that would really be “a plan.” Instead, he relies on the deus ex machina of Congress, waving a legislative wand to make people do things they would choose not to do, given the extravagant and unjustified costs involved.

Having reasons is not “a plan” either, but Mr. Pickens has his reasons. He says we spend $700 billion a year on foreign oil, which he calls a “transfer of wealth.” But exchanging money for oil at the market price is an exchange of things of equal value. If we didn’t value their oil more than our dollars, we wouldn’t participate in such a bargain.

He laments that the U.S. consumes “25% of the world’s oil.” The phraseology is common, and misleading. Oil is produced to meet demand. He might as well complain that, with 25% of the world’s GDP, we consume 25% of the world’s advertising.

In fact, Mr. Pickens’s “plan” bears a family resemblance to…

The Rest of the Story…

A 350-Mile Trip To the Glory Days
By Michael Wilbon
Sunday, August 3, 2008

Few teams in professional sports get to have as grand a day as the Washington Redskins had here Saturday. Any team’s fans can buy out a stadium for a big playoff game or be indulged in a civic championship parade. But how many times can a team’s fans, more than 15,000 of them, monopolize a sport’s Hall of Fame? Not since the old Bulldogs left Canton has the birthplace of professional football so tilted toward one team.

The Redskins and their devotees hadn’t had so much to celebrate in more than 16 years, since Darrell Green and Art Monk were in uniform, not coincidentally. Folks who’ve been coming here for these inductions for 25, 30 years swear no team has produced anything close to the Redskins’ Hall of Fame turnout, not to mention their fervor. Their ovations, particularly the four-minute outpouring that greeted Monk, were as heartfelt as any Sunday afternoon praise during their career.

The mayor of Canton took one look at the crowd, painted in burgundy and gold, and proclaimed it “Redskins Day.” Every seat on every flight Saturday from National, BWI and Dulles airports to nearby Cleveland was occupied. Thousands more drove the 350 miles. Every one of them seemed to be wearing a Redskins jersey, most bearing either Green’s No. 28 or Monk’s No. 81. No single Redskin could have caused this stampede; only a pair as already beloved as Green and Monk could pack the house on the road like this.

Every sighting of every Redskin already in the Hall of Fame was treated like a first appearance. Joe Gibbs, Ken Houston, Bobby Mitchell, Bill Dudley and Charley Taylor all were cheered wildly when introduced. Good thing Sonny Jurgensen and Sam Huff were leading young players through a tour of the Hall at the time, lest their public introduction cause a complete panic.
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Hall of Fame Cowboys were unmercifully booed, especially Michael Irvin, whose beaming smile seemed to suggest an acceptance that boos in the context of this particular afternoon amounted to quite the honor. Thurman Thomas, the Buffalo Bills running back who was inducted here last year, told an ESPN interviewer when asked about the passionate outpouring of the day, “I’m glad I’m not a Cowboy.”

One of today’s “other” inductees, Emmitt Thomas, was enshrined because of his outstanding career as a ball-hawking, head-knocking Kansas City Chiefs cornerback who entered the league an undrafted free agent back when the draft lasted 17 rounds. But real Redskins fans know him as a longtime Joe Gibbs assistant, a man who coached both Monk and Green, an unassuming lieutenant with a wonderful mind for defensive football who, had he been born 15 years later, might have found an owner unafraid to hire him as a head coach.

They’re all part of one fabulously successful era of Redskins football, a masterful run chock-full of smart and resourceful men who cared nothing for stardom and exclusively for team, as out of touch as that phrase now sounds. Even Saturday, on a day when being honored at the highest level of one’s profession might allow for some chest-thumping, former assistant Thomas spoke with his signature humility. Of his former pupils, Monk and Green, sitting behind him, Thomas said, “Both of these men overcame my coaching and had successful careers.” And Thomas might as well have been speaking for all of them when he said: “You’re looking at a man that has a lot of blemishes, abrasions and scars dealt to him by life’s highs and lows. But you’re also looking at a man who stood tall in the arena, never quit even though it looked like the game was over on many, many occasions.”

Every city, if it’s lucky, has an era like the Washington Redskins of 1981-91, teams that win championships and produce Hall of Famers and uncommon good times. Pittsburgh will forever celebrate the four-time champion Steelers of the 1970s. San Francisco has those stylish and prolific Joe Montana teams of the 1980s. Boston and Los Angeles have Bird’s Celtics and Magic’s “Showtime” Lakers, respectively. Chicago revels still in Jordan’s Bulls. New York has, most recently, the late-’90s Yankees teams captained by Derek Jeter. New England has the Patriots, the first great football run of the new century, just as San Antonio has the Spurs of Tim Duncan. They are teams whose championship runs live for decades, teams that become civic treasures and ways by which communities define themselves.

In effect, this just might have been the grandest and final public celebration of the men who comprised those teams in Gibbs’s first tenure. Yes, Green and Monk were enshrined Saturday, but they weren’t the sole objects of all that affection. Monk and Green were, in effect, stand-ins this weekend for the Hogs, the Fun Bunch, the Pearl Harbor Crew, even a few stragglers from the Over the Hill Gang. For Joe Theismann, Doug Williams, Mark Rypien, Dexter Manley, Earnest Byner, Monte Coleman, Darryl Grant, Charles Mann, Mark Moseley, Bobby Beathard, Richie Petitbon, Joe Bugel, Bubba Tyer, and on and on and on.

The Redskins may not pass this way again for a while. The Hall of Fame is an especially difficult place to come to rest. Joe Jacoby’s name has come up in the Hall of Fame discussions over the years, but briefly. Russ Grimm’s name has come up a little more extensively, though not enough for my tastes. Jeff Bostic was awfully, awfully good for a very long time, but Canton is most likely out of his reach.

Gibbs, John Riggins, Darrell Green and Art Monk. That’s the list. Nobody in the seasons since even appears on the horizon, not yet anyway. Those are going to be the most decorated of the Redskins, of a very special time in the team’s history, in Washington’s history. The cheers here today were for all of them, really.

Green and Monk wore the yellow Hall of Fame jackets that are so coveted by every player who ever enters the NFL. But the teammates they sweated with, bled with, and mostly won with were alongside them for every step on the trip to Canton, through the speeches, the pats on the back and the atta-boys, especially the ovations that began in the warm sun and lasted happily deep into the rarest of nights.

Obama sowing socialist seeds in young people
Jon Voight
Monday, July 28, 2008

From: www.washingtontimes.com

We, as parents, are well aware of the importance of our teachers who teach and program our children. We also know how important it is for our children to play with good-thinking children growing up.

Sen. Barack Obama has grown up with the teaching of very angry, militant white and black people: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, William Ayers and Rev. Michael Pfleger. We cannot say we are not affected by teachers who are militant and angry. We know too well that we become like them, and Mr. Obama will run this country in their mindset.

The Democratic Party, in its quest for power, has managed a propaganda campaign with subliminal messages, creating a God-like figure in a man who falls short in every way. It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America.

The Democrats have targeted young people, knowing how easy it is to bring forth whatever is needed to program their minds. I know this process well. I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement. The radicals of that era were successful in giving the communists power to bring forth the killing fields and slaughter 2.5 million people in Cambodia and South Vietnam. Did they stop the war, or did they bring the war to those innocent people? In the end, they turned their backs on all the horror and suffering they helped create and walked away.

Those same leaders who were in the streets in the ’60s are very powerful today in their work to bring down the Iraq war and to attack our president, and they have found their way into our schools. William Ayers is a good example of that.

Thank God, today, we have a strong generation of young soldiers who know exactly who they are and what they must do to protect our freedom and our democracy. And we have the leadership of Gen. David Petraeus, who has brought hope and stability to Iraq and prevented the terrorists from establishing a base in that country. Our soldiers are lifting us to an example of patriotism at a time when we’ve almost forgotten who we are and what is at stake.

If Mr. Obama had his way, he would have pulled our troops from Iraq years ago and initiated an unprecedented bloodbath, turning over that country to the barbarianism of our enemies. With what he has openly stated about his plans for our military, and his lack of understanding about the true nature of our enemies, there’s not a cell in my body that can accept the idea that Mr. Obama can keep us safe from the terrorists around the world, and from Iran, which is making great strides toward getting the atomic bomb. And while a misleading portrait of Mr. Obama is being perpetrated by a media controlled by the Democrats, the Obama camp has sent out people to attack the greatness of Sen. John McCain, whose suffering and courage in a Hanoi prison camp is an American legend.

Gen. Wesley Clark, who himself has shame upon him, having been relieved of his command, has done their bidding and become a lying fool in his need to demean a fellow soldier and a true hero.

This is a perilous time, and more than ever, the world needs a united and strong America. If, God forbid, we live to see Mr. Obama president, we will live through a socialist era that America has not seen before, and our country will be weakened in every way.

Jon Voight is an Academy Award-winning actor who is well-known for his humanitarian work.

From: www.powerlineblog.com
July 28, 2008

Barack Obama is the most left-wing candidate the Democrats have nominated since George McGovern. If Obama wins the presidency, I think it is fair to postulate that it will be George McGovern’s first term. Like McGovern, Obama staked out his territory as the antiwar candidate at the left end of the field of Democratic presidential candidates. His antiwar position, including his concocted critique of Hillary Clinton’s purported “saber rattling” on Iran, was his signature issue through the Democratic primaries.

One of the ironies of Obama’s sermon to the Germans last week was his praise of the 1948 airlift that broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin. The heart of the sermon to the Germans was Obama’s “one world” message: “This is the moment to stand as one.” By avoiding any historical detail regarding the airlift, Obama integrates the airlift into his theme of unity:

The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold.

But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city’s mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. “There is only one possibility,” he said. “For us to stand together united until this battle is won…The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty…People of the world, look at Berlin!”

Obama does not even mention the name of Harry Truman. It was Truman’s will alone, together with the resulting efforts of the United States and British military forces, that resulted in the airlift and its improbable success. As David McCullough notes in…

The Rest of the Story…

Via Powerlineblog.com

David Evans was a consultant to the “Australian Greenhouse Office” from 1999 to 2005. He is a former global warming alarmist; however, he is also a scientist who goes where the evidence leads him. In this important article in The Australian, he blows the whistle on the fraud that many of the world’s governments are in the midst of perpetrating:

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

The Rest of the Story…

Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, July 17, 2008

In the last 20 years, we were lectured constantly about “post-industrial” America.

Experts proclaimed that the United States had evolved into an “information society” of “high-tech jobs.” The traditional sources of American strength — manufacturing, the production of food and fuel, and the assembling of cars and trucks — were apparently passé. Instead, others less fortunate abroad were to do those more grubby tasks, while Americans, with their BlackBerrys and laptops, funded, organized, lectured and critiqued them.

Illegal aliens might cook our meals or change our children’s diapers to free us up for far more important tasks of litigation, finance and environmental review. The Chinese would make everything from our shoes to our phones. The Japanese would supply us with quality high-end goods like cars and cameras. The Africans, Arabs, Iranians, Russians and Venezuelans would drill oil in nasty, dirty places so we wouldn’t have to.

Even our food — which would be always in season — would increasingly be shipped in from Mexico and South America.

Refined Americans became more concerned over questions of gender, race and class justice in our universities and courtrooms, as if the chief problem were only dividing the American pie equitably, rather than expanding it.

The real source of American wealth apparently was the mere fact that we were Americans. Therefore, the rest of the world should naturally loan us money to sustain our envied lifestyle. Our homes got bigger, and we bought and sold them more as investments than as places to raise our families.

Our top graduates opted for Wall Street, insurance, law, journalism and academia. Why not, when laws made it more conducive to invest and trade, but harder and less lucrative to build, drill, farm and manufacture?

American universities bragged that they were teaching the world how to design and engineer — as our own kids gravitated to law and management schools. We relied on a paternalistic government to regulate what we shouldn’t do rather than turn to our best and brightest private citizens to show us what we could.

Alas, no successful civilization in history — Greece, Rome, England, France, the list goes on — ever found prosperity through its bureaucrats and lawyers.

The result of all this growing American laxity and condescension so far is mixed.

The good news, aside from the fact that Americans have never had it so good, is that millions in China are no longer starving. Japan talks of marketing hybrid cars, not re-establishing its old “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” The Persian Gulf looks more like Las Vegas than the badlands of Waziristan. Billions in the new globalized world are now emulating the American middle class, which, for all the caricatures, still represents freedom and affluence for so many.

The downside, of course, is a growing collective panic here at home, over whether such undeniable progress is sustainable when America is up to its neck in debt, dependent on foreign energy and plagued by self-doubt and inaction.

Our 21st-century paralysis is surprising. The United States is not materially exhausted. We sit atop trillions of dollars worth of untapped oil, gas, coal, shale and tar sands.

America could mine more uranium, and reprocess fuels to build hundreds of nuclear plants. American agriculture is blessed with the world’s best soils, most developed irrigation systems, and most productive and astute farmers.

There is as much sun and wind in the western United States as anywhere in the world. We have plenty of natural resources and the know-how to make all the wood, steel and cement products we need.

A new, hungrier generation of Americans will have to want to reclaim our pre-eminence and change the national attitude. It must be ready to pay off generations of debt rather than borrow, build rather than sue, and drill rather than whine.

It’s time to honor rather than avoid and outsource physical labor. Our children are healthy enough to cut our own lawns and pick our fruit. Let’s also hope they want to hear a lot more about Gen. David Petraeus’ success, and a lot less of Madonna’s latest psychodramas.

But just as importantly, what Americans need now is leadership to get moving again — rather than more platitudes about hope, squabbling about race and gender, and endless rhetoric about who is really a maverick or a true conservative or the most liberal. What we need to know from our two presidential candidates are specifics about how to jumpstart America.

So, how many more barrels of oil, refineries and megawatts will America produce –and when and how? How much debt will the next administration retire — and when and how. How and when will our schools return to knowledge-based rather than the present (and failing) therapeutic curriculum?

Americans, in short, should be tired of hearing that we are a post-industrial, postmodern, post-anything society. Instead, we want to be known again as a can-do producer nation that sweats as much as it thinks. And the confident presidential candidate who can best assure us of that will surely win this election.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

Each year I get to celebrate Independence Day twice. On June 30 I celebrate my independence day and on July 4 I celebrate America’s. This year is special, because it marks the 40th anniversary of my independence.

On June 30, 1968, I escaped Communist Cuba and a few months later I was in the United States to stay. That I happened to arrive in Richmond on Thanksgiving Day is just part of the story, but I digress.

I’ve thought a lot about the anniversary this year. The election-year rhetoric has made me think a lot about Cuba and what transpired there. In the late 1950s, most Cubans thought Cuba needed a change, and they were right. So when a young leader came along, every Cuban was at least receptive.

When the young leader spoke eloquently and passionately and denounced the old system, the press fell in love with him. They never questioned who his friends were or what he really believed in. When he said he would help the farmers and the poor and bring free medical care and education to all, everyone followed. When he said he would bring justice and equality to all, everyone said “Praise the Lord.” And when the young leader said, “I will be for change and I’ll bring you change,” everyone yelled, “Viva Fidel!”

But nobody asked about the change, so by the time the executioner’s guns went silent the people’s guns had been taken away. By the time everyone was equal, they were equally poor, hungry, and oppressed. By the time everyone received their free education it was worth nothing. By the time the press noticed, it was too late, because they were now working for him. By the time the change was finally implemented Cuba had been knocked down a couple of notches to Third-World status. By the time the change was over more than a million people had taken to boats, rafts, and inner tubes. You can call those who made it ashore anywhere else in the world the most fortunate Cubans. And now I’m back to the beginning of my story.

Luckily, we would never fall in America for a young leader who promised change without asking, what change? How will you carry it out? What will it cost America?

Would we?

Manuel Alvarez Jr. Sandy Hook.

Source

From the Evangelical Outpost:

“That movie was totally overrated. Now if you want to see a really worthwhile flick you should see…” Because film buffs like me say this type of thing all the time so I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to actually list 50 of the most overrated and 50 of the most underrated films of all time.

A few of the overrated films are just plain bad while most are merely undeserving of the critical or popular praise they receive. The underrated films, though, are all examples of excellent cinema and should be considered at least slightly more worthy than the corresponding “overrated” film with which they share a category. The categories, which range from the obvious to the just plain odd, are intended to cover a broad selection of interests but are not meant to be exhaustive.

Here then are 100 of the most overrated and underrated films of all time (overrated on the left, underrated on the right):

The Rest of the Story…

The ability to write well is very useful for our personal and professional lives. It helps students, business people, politicians, writers, bloggers, marketers and everyone who has ever needed to arrange words together to convey ideas or opinions. The written word has become an essential means of social communication: mastery of it helps you to enthrall and persuade an audience that would look upon you favorably in return…

The Rest of the Story…

Ann Coulter
Thursday, July 10, 2008

Last Friday, on the Fourth of July, the great American patriot Jesse Helms passed away. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also went to their great reward on Independence Day, so this is further proof of God.

Helms is now the second great American patriot I’ve always wanted to meet and never will, at least in this lifetime. The only other one is the magnificent Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger. (Wikipedia quote: “I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.”)

After a week of hundreds of Helms obituaries — one or two of which were not completely dishonest — I will mention just a few items that were not addressed or given sufficient attention.

The two most obsessively discussed topics among Senate staffers are: (1) Who is the stupidest senator? (Sen. Barbara Boxer pulled into the lead when Sen. Lincoln Chafee retired), and (2) which senators are beastly and which are wonderful to their staff?

When I worked in the Senate in the ’90s, the two senators famous for being absolute princes to work for were Sen. Helms and — it pains me to tell you this, so you know it has to be true — Sen. Teddy Kennedy. (He was so nice to his staffers, he frequently offered them rides home in his car after parties.)

I never knew — and you never knew, unless you read one of the two honest obituaries this past week…

The Rest of the Story…

By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, July 10, 2008

Almost everyone is talking about Barack Obama’s flip-flops, as the Senate’s most liberal member steadily moves to the political center and disowns firebrands like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger.

But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain’s efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts.

Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-rights advocate. Like Bush…

The Rest of the Story…