Ann Althouse writes that Bill O’Reilly “spouts right-wing economic theories.”
What does that mean?
I’ve heard Bill O’Reilly rant against free trade, complain about “fat cats,” whine about “obscene” profits from oil companies, price gougers, etc., but in that, he seems to be more attuned to Democrats than “right wingers.” Say what you want about O’Reilly, but he’s no “right winger” (at least if, by that, one means a classical liberal who believes in free markets). He’s a populist, who is just “looking out for the folks” (at least to hear him tell it–never mind the actual effects of his anti-market nostrums). Just another example of the meaninglessness (and uselessness) of the labels (e.g., “neocon,” “conservative,” “fascist”) that get pointlessly thrown around the arena.
The day job, that is, which seems to primarily consist of running for the next office. Senator Obama tries to bring the funny.
“I mean, mother, governor, moose shooter?! I mean I think that’s cool, that’s cool stuff,” Obama said about Palin’s biography.
When discussing McCain’s energy plan, Obama poked fun at his line on drilling. “What were the Republicans hollerin’, ‘drill baby drill’? What kind of slogan is that?! They were getting all excited about drilling!”
Maybe you had to be there.
And how politically stupid is it to make fun of hunters in Michigan (which in fact does have moose in the western UP)?
…note that Obama and his supporters speak a great deal about Obama’s choice to be a community organizer, and not so much on what he actually did. We’re continually expected to applaud the decision to try instead of asking about the results. We never hear, “because of his work, Factory X reopened,” or “because of Obama’s creation of job retraining program Y, the community’s unemployment rate reduced from A to B.”
Yes, with so-called “liberals,” it’s always about the good intentions, and we’re not supposed to pay any attention to actual results.
We’re having a block party tonight – yes, another block party; damned community can’t stop organizing itself (if I may repeat something I said over at Tim Blair’s place – successful communities, or those on track to becoming successful, organize themselves; if you need someone to come in and do your organizing for you, he might as well call himself Mollusk Wrangler or Sloth Herder. I say this as a former community organizer myself, but that’s another story) so we’ll all stand outside and chat and eat pot luck.
If your community needs an “organizer” it’s probably not much of a community. It’s just a lot of people living in close proximity.
And just a hint for some in comments: given Obama’s image problem with his messiah complex, it’s probably not politically helpful to compare him to Jesus…
Jessica Gavora, native Alaskan (and aka better half of Jonah Goldberg) has some thoughts on basketball and Sarah Palin:
We didn’t play basketball to pad our college applications or fulfill some bureaucrat’s notion of “gender equity.” We played because the winters were long and cold and dark. There was nothing else to do. Maybe as a result, basketball was deadly serious business. Away games were played at the end of eight-hour bus rides or
harrowing plane landings in frozen, remote villages. Our opponents were tough, and the fans were unforgiving. And even though the law that feminists like to credit with all female athletic success, Title IX, was then unenforced in high school sports, we girls wouldn’t have dreamed of taking second place to the boys–nor did we.
Palin earned her now-famous nickname on the hardcourt–“Sarah Barracuda.” Her enemies have tried to belittle her by pointing to her stint as a beauty queen, but it is clear that Palin’s background in sports, more than any other experience, is what has made her the existential threat to liberal feminism (and possibly the Democratic ticket) that she is today.
I wonder how she’d do one on one with Senator Obama? Did he ever win a state championship for his team? Perhaps it’s another comparison that his campaign should avoid.
Senator Obama says he’s not going to take our guns away, because he doesn’t have the votes in Congress. What a politically brilliant thing to say in Pennsylvania. And he says that he’s not going to take them out of our house. What he doesn’t say is that he doesn’t want us to take them out of our house, either.
While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.
People who go to work for the government with the expectation that it will provide them with retirement security are kidding themselves.
Getting local politicians *and* local unions to think more than a year or two is all but impossible. Do you realize that practically no local jurisdictions even have a Liabilities Budget?
It’s just part of that visionary and long-range thinking on the part of governments.
Here’s a Time article on how the Obama campaign plans to deal with Sarah. I was struck by the very first graf.
Nobody was more surprised by John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate than the people who run Barack Obama’s campaign. “I can honestly say that we weren’t prepared for that,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist. “I mean, her name wasn’t on anybody’s list. It was a surprise to a lot of Republicans as well.”
Well, why weren’t they prepared for it? A lot of the non-left blogs have been speculating about her for months. Rush reportedly was talking her up months ago, and there have been threads at Free Republic about her. She had come to Arizona to visit McCain’s house there. It was no big intellectual challenge to figure out that she was on the list, if not the short one.
Is this kind of intelligence cluelessness the way they plan to run the country?