Links and Minifeatures 2008 10 08 Wednesday

Neighborhoods of La Mesa: Lake Murray

I've also added links to a couple of my social media pages in the sidebars.

Oh, my: Is this the smoking gun that costs Obama the election?

On a Martin Luther King zero to ten scale for judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, this is pretty much a zero.

Sauce for the Goose Department: Can you imagine what the outcry would be if John McCain were on the record as saying something like this about black people?

This disgusts me. Serving their country, found a dog they want to adopt, and stupid military brass decides to make jerks out of themselves.

Stuff like this does not just hurt one soldier. It hurts the whole unit, at a minimum. Were I that officer's superior, they would be relieved for unfitness for command. The more attention the situation generates, the more likely a favorable resolution.

An ad that has been purchased for during the debate tonight (October 7th)

Which candidate supports EFCA? Barack Obama
Which candidate is against it? John McCain.

When George McGovern speaks out against a union sponsored bill, in agreement with John McCain, you know something is rotten on the other side.

Nothing to see here. Move along. Democrats refuse to talk about Fannie, Freddie in Oversight hearing

Christopher Shays ripped the Oversight Committee for its refusal to investigate Congress itself:

"The reason we haven't scheduled hearings on these two institutions and haven't requested documents from either is because their demise isn't someone else's fault -- it's ours, and we don't want to own up to it."

Here's the thing about debates: You have to pay attention. It only seemed like a snoozefest on the surface.

For example: There was one question asked tonight about the use of force in the future. Obama gave some standardized platitudes that didn't really mean anything, although he still managed to contradict his earlier position. McCain started talking about Iraq. Even I, a McCain supporter, was thinking, "Get out of the tunnel, John!" However, he used that point about Iraq as a starting point to tie into the future use of force and how if you don't stay and finish the job you start, you end up having to go back under worse conditions, which impacts your ability to respond to the other situations that are certain to pop up. Planning and execution of this brilliant improvisation: two minutes, on the fly, just McCain himself - no staff, no focus groups, no nothing. Nothing too emotional, just a compelling story told in an intelligent way from a current starting point that illustrated he was right, rather than just claiming to be right. But the intellectual beauty of doing so on the fly like that was inspiring. It left me in no doubt which of these men has the intellectual resources to better lead the nation.

I did think Obama made some good points, but he also outright lied half a dozen times, most egregiously about Fannie and Freddie and the causes of the current meltdown. No, McCain didn't knock him out. But if Obama had been a boxer, he would have been bloody, bruised, and just barely aware of where he was. If the vast majority of the media were not Obama partisans, Obama wouldn't be even close to John McCain in the election.

Was his performance good enough to turn this thing around for McCain? Not by itself. But he did set himself up well. Now he has to go out and solidify what he started with the American people, and he's going to have to dish out a lot more red meat than he has of late. Playing it safe when you're behind towards the end of the game isn't going to cut it.

On that same question Obama's 180 on genocide

In such cases, answered Obama, "we have moral issues at stake." Of course the United States must act to stop genocide, he said. "When genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening . . . and we stand idly by, that diminishes us."

But that wasn't how Obama sounded last year, when he was competing for the Democratic nomination and was unbending in his demand for an American retreat from Iraq. Back then, he dismissed fears that a US withdrawal would unleash a massive Iraqi bloodbath. "Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep US forces there," the AP reported on July 20, 2007 (my italics).

Which is it? Do you think we might have a moral obligation to stay in Iraq, having broken their previous state? Or should we have abandoned the Iraqi's to genocidal civil war, having no moral reason whatsoever to stay?

My vote is that it's just Barack Obama telling a given audience what he thinks they want to hear.

Michael Barone: Three reasons William Ayers is relevant to the election