Apocalypse NOW!!! Can American Capitalism be Saved?

Dan Henninger has an excellent piece on the now-or-never November 4th showdown which the Democratic "Coup de Pouce" electorally will employ, if it is victorious, into an Enabling Act, such as the one in January 1933 which thrust another visionary leader forward to rescue his nation in parlous economic times:

....one sees something even larger at stake in this vote. One sees what Joe (The Plumber) Wurzelbacher saw. The real "change" being put to a vote for the American people in 2008 is not simply a break from the economic policies of "the past eight years" but with the American economic philosophy of the past 200 years. This election is about a long-term change in America's idea of itself.

I don't agree with the argument that an Obama-Pelosi-Reid government is a one-off, that good old nonideological American pragmatism will temper their ambitions. Not true. With this election, the U.S. is at a philosophical tipping point.

The goal of Sen. Obama and the modern, "progressive" Democratic Party is to move the U.S. in the direction of Western Europe, the so-called German model and its "social market economy." Under this notion, business is highly regulated, as it would be in the next Congress under Democratic House committee chairmen Markey, Frank and Waxman. Business is allowed to create "wealth" so long as its utility is not primarily to create new jobs or economic growth but to support a deep welfare system.

Like Obama's German model in 1933, opposition will be squelched [The oxymoronic "Fairness Doctrine" doesn't touch TV, press, only "talk radio."] A gigantic PUTSCH will engender in 2008 the sort of socialism-in-one-country which Obama's European intellectual forebearers put forward in 1933 in Germany and years before that with collectivization & forced famines in a "workers' paradise" east of Germany by a strongman named after a metal. Stalin.

Henninger doesn't say this, of course, and there will not be the vicious brutality Europeans have consistently demonstrated in asserting their political will throughout the 20th century. [Including Kaiser Wilhelm & Mussolini & other national experiments in social justice.] Henninger does say this:

The political planets are aligned to make this achievable. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, prominent Democrats, European leaders in France and Germany and more U.S. newspaper articles than one can count have said that the crisis proves the need to permanently tame the American "free-market" model. P.O.W. Alan Greenspan is broadcasting confessions. The question is: Are the American people of a mind to throw in the towel on the system that got them here?

This would be a historic shift, one post-Vietnam Democrats have been trying to achieve since their failed fight with Ronald Reagan's "Cowboy Capitalism."

Of course Cowboy Capitalism built the country. More than any previous nation in history, the United States made its way forward on a 200-year wave of upwardly mobile, profit-seeking merchants, tradesmen, craftsmen and workers. They blew out of New England and New York, rolled across the wildernesses of the Central States, pushed across a tough Western frontier and banged into San Francisco and Los Angeles, leaving in their path city after city of vast wealth.

The U.S. emerged a superpower, and the tool of that ascent was simple -- the pursuit of economic growth. Now China, India and Brazil, embracing high-growth Cowboy Capitalism, are doing what we did, only their cities are bigger.

Now comes Barack Obama, standing at the head of a progressive Democratic Party, his right hand rising to say, "Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be for-profit cowboys. It's time to spread the wealth around."

What this implies, undeniably, is that the United States would move away from running with the high GDP, high-growth nations rising today as economic and political powers and move over to retire with the low-growth economies we displaced -- old Europe.

Yes, Nabokov had it right in Lolita: the dirty old European has soiled the young American---not young America seducing old Europe. And as in Europe, the cringing worker will be protected from those nasty economic forces that have made the USA the ultimate Faustian country, versus the Parnassian effete slackers living in the museum of a continent still stuck in a bell jar of early 20th c. class hatreds and bourgeois sensibilities. Here is more Henninger:

As noted in a 2006 World Bank report, spending in Europe on social-protection programs averages 19% of GDP (85% of it on social insurance programs), compared to 9% of GDP in the U.S. The Obama proposals send the U.S. inexorably and permanently toward European levels of social protection. This isn't an "agenda." It's a final temptation.

In partial detail:

Obama's federalized medical insurance system starts the transition away from private medical care and toward Obama's endlessly promised "universal health care." This has always been the sine qua non of planting a true, managed-market economy in the U.S.

Obama's refundable tax credits are direct cash transfers from the federal government. This would place some 48% of Americans, nearly half, out of the income tax system. More than a tax proposal, this is a deep philosophical shift, an American version of being "on the dole."

His stated intent to renegotiate free-trade agreements such as Nafta is a philosophical shift. It abandons the tradition of a hyper-competitive America dating back to the Industrial Revolution, toward a protected, domestic workforce, as in Western Europe. The Democratic proposal to eliminate private union votes -- "card check" -- ensures the spread of a static, Euro-style workforce.

Eliminating the ceiling on payroll taxes changes Social Security from an insurance to a welfare program. Obama's tax credits requires performing government-identified activities, the essence of a "directed economy."

All this would transform the animating American idea -- away from creation and toward protection.

Many voters -- progressive Democrats, the asset-safe rich, academics and college students -- regard this as where America should go. They explicitly want America's great natural energies transferred away from unwieldy economic competition and toward social construction. They want the U.S. to reduce its "footprint" in the world. Monies saved by stepping down from superpower status can be reprogrammed into "investments" (a favorite Obama word) in a vast Euro-style hammock of social protection programs.

One wishes John McCain had been better able to make clear what the truly "historic" meaning of Tuesday's vote is. Once it's done, it's done.

McCain was himself a compromise candidate who always tried to split the middle to come up with a compromise----only too late has he realized that the class-warfare Democrats want no part of his McCain/Feingold public financing or other fair play measures this honorable, but somewhat clueless fellow succumbed to while the Dems are burying him with undisclosed foreign monies that will never be traced. And when McCain said Andrew Cuomo, a Dem FanFred RICO-scammer/partner, should be put in charge of the SEC, I realized that old John is simply one election cycle past electability.

Now Chicago's [Jurassic] Hyde Park will coalesce with NYC's Upper West Side & the California Left Coasters to work DC and the USA like a rented mule.

Cash will be raining onto the Dem slacker constituencies and will convert enough MOR layabouts into addicts at the federal crystal meth palace so that participatory democracy need not rear its head again..... The "Fairness Doctrine" will keep any discouraging words from turning the sheeple against their new shepherds.

Fouad Ajami Deflates the Tires of Redeemer Obama

Fouad Ajami and I first met in 1979, when he arrived in DC to start teaching at SAIS. He stayed in my DuPont Circle condo for a week and was reading The Raj Trilogy on India and Sigmund Freud. Fouad adored India as the perfectly tolerant society and was reading Freud to understand the strange spell this semi-fraud had thrown over psychiatry---except for C.G. Jung whom I told Fouad was the perfect antidote to Freud's family drama introspection.

Three years later, after I married Marilyn, my condo on N St., N.W, a different place in the same neighborhood near SAIS, became available and Fouad rented my place while I shacked up with my spouse in Wesley Heights. Fouad was "dating" the personal secretary of the Saudi Ambassador, a very attractive young woman, at the time and we had some social interactions [I had been Embassy Pol Officer in Jidda for three years and knew the Amb & a lot of her bosses in the Saudi Foreign Ministry.]

I sold the condo and we stayed in touch for a while, but one of our last meetings I recall vividly. Fouad had sent his son to Ann Arbor to study under Ali Mazrui, a famous African [Kenyan, I believe] intellectual, and I reminded Fouad of my three formative years in Ann Arbor in the late sixties. Fouad then opened up with an outburst of great praise, the only way to describe his observations, concerning the REAL America he had discovered in Michigan and the rest of the Middle West. [Shades of Sarah Palin!] Fouad said he now understood America's greatness and that the immense latitudes between New York & Los Angeles were not simply what he had imagined them to be---a combination of Europe & Anatolian countrysides.

Fouad has always been aware of the immense self-deceptions political cultures inflict on subject populations---and there is no other way to describe Obama's crowds except throngs begging for redemption after being brainwashed into believing they are GUILTY---of everything imaginable that flaky decadent intellectuals of the left accuse them of. Guilty of leaviing a carbon imprint merely by breathing. Guilty of productive labor while millions shirk and become stoned slackers. Guilty of consuming and gaining a bit of excess weight.

There are analogies in American history to the kinds of crowds Fouad notes flow towards Obama seeking equality. The Great Awakenings of the late 18th century and the early 19th centuries with their "burnt-over districts" in upstate New York spawned new millenarian cults [Joseph Smith par exemple] and a burst of religious fervor filled with missionary appeal that turned huge numbers of Americans into Methodists and Baptists----faiths underrepresented before. This religious tone gave Lincoln's greatest speeches their universal validity.

Perhaps Obama in his vague undefined and remote persona exemplifies another American Great Awakening, this time seeking protection by Big Brother and ushering in an era when War is Peace, Love is Hate, and Ignorance is Everywhere.

Perhaps the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a book by Charles Mackay in 1841 which to this day is perhaps the most accurate description of what Fouad eloquently describes in Canetti's Nobel Peace Prize effort. In Mackay's quaint words which describe the ridiculous sight of the British Parliament debating Global Warming measures during the first October snowfall in London since 1922:

"Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome."

and Mackay's other great line is equally true as Americans go ga-ga about to vote in a fraud as fraudulent as Freud:

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!"

The American people are straining at the McCain/Palin gnat while they swallow the Obama/Biden camel.

Oil at $50/barrel? Bye bye to Chavez & Putin & Ahmedinejad for a While

Energy & Capital has an excellent analysis of the world economy as it makes a flight to quality, making the yen and the dollar the two most desirable currencies right now in the world. Driving all this is the price of oil, denominated in US dollars and the weakness of the dollar made prices vault above $100. As the dollar strengthens, the converse is true and today's price of $65 may still have more juice to be squeezed before it hits what writer Chris Nelder says is a natural floor of $50/barrel.

Believe it or not, the US & Japan are the best placed countries right now, though bonds rather than equities may be the best bet for the next two years. And there is bad news for America's enemies, including [in my p.o.v.] Vlad the KGB Empoisoner, who has financed his aggression in Georgia [and perhaps next in Ukraine] due to windfall profits from the oil trade.

Also, if the US suffers from an Obama victory, this demagogue in short pants will be unable to inflict punitive taxes on oil profits, as they will have shrunk to the size of a peanut farmer's brain. No more Corinthian columns or grandiose trappings of POTUS redistribution of wealth, unless this clown wants to make a bad situation worse!

Legendary oil man Charles Maxwell, in a recent interview with The Money Show, noted that much of the world has fairly high breakeven cost points, which he cited as follows:

Saudi Arabia at $55/barrel; Russia at $70; Most of OPEC at $70-90; Iranians and Venezuela at $90

Therefore, at the most recent range of $62-65, oil is already at or below the breakeven cost for most of the world's remaining oil reserves!

It is not inconceivable that producers might produce at a loss for a short while. For example, some drillers will need to keep the cash flowing in order to meet regular payments on their next order of rigs, or risk losing their place in the rig delivery queue, with significant impacts on their future production schedules.

But at some point, oil producers will have to see profitability return, or they will lay down their rigs. (Numerous natural gas drilling rigs are already being idled in North America, due to the similarly depressed price of natural gas.) Eventually, the reduced supply will put the fire back under prices.

When that might happen, though, is hard to say. We must be somewhere near to a floor in oil, if we're already under the breakeven costs. If oil went back to $50, it couldn't stay there for long.

Read the entire article for an insightful excursion through the world's oncoming economic woes over the next few years. The strong dollar will keep oil prices down, And as the banks hoard their cash, rather than allowing the credit with the new infusions from DC to be the emollient of world trade, a seizing up may occur which is already leaving grain on the docks of US & other exporters as letters of credit [things Democrats don't understand] lose cred. As world trade continues to dwindle due to US protectionism [no Colombia FTA], the Dems archaic nineteenth c. economic philosophy will prolong the recession, allowing a rational economic administration to be elected in four years, unless by then the US has devolved into an authoritarian populist banana republic [Fairness Doctrine & other absurdities ensuring a tyranny of the minority].

Trial lawyers, media moguls politicos and other fingerpointers will predictably try to blame the productive part of the U.S. economy, ballooning the parasitic constituencies and dependencies of the Dem lumpenprole left. In sum,

What this all points to is a vicious feedback loop. As emerging economies struggle with trade deficits and reduced liquidity, borrowing costs rise, leading to more credit defaults, higher interest rates, and even tighter credit, which in turn slows down growth even more, causing businesses to shrink, and their creditworthiness to be further impaired.

This feedback loop will continue to drive down the price of oil and other commodities for the near future. This is why I have been saying for roughly the last two months that the trade in energy and commodities is simply broken, having more to do with the mechanics of global big money flows than fundamental business considerations.

Lower US and European demand for Asian goods will continue to put the hurts on Asian economies. Depressed growth expectations for China and India will feed back to the US and Europe in the form of lower equity prices, particularly in energy and commodities.

The withdrawal of European investors from emerging markets will slow them down even more. European banks lent $3.5 trillion to these economies—roughly 7 times what the US lent—and accounted for three quarters of loans to China and India, according to Stephen Jen, chief currency strategist at Morgan Stanley in London.

Yes, a world recession, and all caused not at all by the insane mortgage lending policies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, husbanded into their CRA lunacies by Barney Frank's husband-of-the-moment back in the early '90s. Call the current recession around the world a delayed herpes irruption from that gift that keeps on giving, the Clinton Administrations of the late '90s!

Howard Fineman "Astonished" That the Race is so Close

Newsweak Pundit Fineman appears to be on the Keith Odorboy Show almost nightly, and is still a bit confused. Read what this indefatigable sycophant whose bias has been pro-Obama non-stop 24-7-365 since it was decided by the Libtard Presidium last year that Hillary was not acceptable---leaving only Obama as their sock-puppet-in-charge:

By all accounts and by all odds, Obama is fairly comfortably ahead in the Electoral College—which, as Al Gore will tell you, is what matters.

On TV Wednesday night, Obama will give what one aide described to me as a “meaty” discourse on his basic tax and health-care proposals. No high-flown rhetoric, but rather a briefing paper for wary undecided swing voters---most of whom, the campaign thinks, are “soft Republicans” who kind of want to vote for Obama but need reassurance.

And yet, in the meantime, Sen. John McCain has not quite disappeared in the rear-view mirror.

I find that astonishing. And, if you are in the Obama campaign, you have to find that at the very least a teeny bit troubling in these last days.

Let me repeat the following litany, just for the sake of wonder if nothing else:

Consumer confidence is at an all-time low. The job performance rating of the outgoing Republican president is at Nixon-Carter levels. Nine out of ten voters think the country is off on the wrong track. The Democrats lead in the generic congressional preference vote by a double-digit margin.

Obama has outspent McCain on TV advertising three or four to one (though McCain is matching him in some key states here at the end). Obama has four thousand paid organizers in key states, an unheard of number. Most voters think that McCain’s running mate is not qualified to be president. Many people wonder aloud if McCain is in fact too old (72) to be president. Much of the media coverage of Obama has been fawning to say the least, and with good reason. He is one of the most winsome, charismatic candidates to have appeared on the scene in decades.

Still, in today’s “traditional Gallup” Daily Tracking Poll (the one that screens likely voters most rigorously, based on past votes), Obama leads McCain by only two percentage points, 49 to 47 percent.

Yep, it's the culture war, according to this armchair admiral, or whatever you call an underqualified opinionated hack nowadays.

Couldn't be that Obama has been uniunvestigated, or that his associations with treasonous racist rabble like Ayers, Wright, Farrakhan, and crooks like Rezko might bother more curious and less gullible Americans who are guilty of exercising their intellects rather than judging winsome charisma as the chief qualification to be POTUS.

That would be assuming that the average American is far brighter and ethically and morally superior to the lax stoned slackers that comprise the libtard socialist-wannabes scribbling daily their lubricious nonsense about a remote and undefined fellow who may be worse than Jimmy Carter, another "winsome" dude with a toothy smile and not much else above the neck.

Sarkozy Calls Obama Soft on Iran

Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper, has a piece on Obama's "immature" take on Iran. Steve Taranto in the WSJ riffs on the Realpolitik Sarkozy expresses thusly:

One of the things that cost John Kerry the White House in 2004 was the revelation that he looked French. Paris's perfidy over the Iraq war had left America with a suspicion of all things Gallic, and the Democrats, as the "Frenchier" party, suffered for it.

Now France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is criticizing one of our presidential candidates for his attitude toward Iran, which Sarkozy calls "utterly immature," according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. And we have to admit, John McCain's Beach Boys parody ("bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran") was rather adolescent. But c'mon, Nick, lighten up. Haven't the French ever heard of gallows humor?

Hold on a second. It turns out Sarkozy isn't referring to McCain at all:

Sarkozy is very critical of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama's positions on Iran, according to reports that have reached Israel's government.
Sarkozy has made his criticisms only in closed forums in France. But according to a senior Israeli government source, the reports reaching Israel indicate that Sarkozy views the Democratic candidate's stance on Iran as "utterly immature" and comprised of "formulations empty of all content." . . .
Until now, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany have tried to maintain a united front on Iran. But according to the senior Israeli source, Sarkozy fears that Obama might "arrogantly" ignore the other members of this front and open a direct dialogue with Iran without preconditions.

So the president of France is criticizing an American politician for not being tough enough on a despotic Middle Eastern regime? Is this Erret (le bizarro monde), or are we going to have to reconsider our stereotypes of the French?

I agree with Steve that the French Prez's take on haute politique is far more perceptive than the beerhall musings of Die Spiegel in its hallucinations of The Golden Fart Blossom as a nicer, kinder version of their own playground bully Adolf of a few generations back. As the late John Lennon sang in "Revolution," we'd all like to change the world. The Germans normally attempt their corrective movements on world politics with an excessive amount of Sturm und Drang.

Maybe the French method is better in this case, at least for the Middle East, where the Germans tipped their hand a few generations back on demonstrating their "extreme prejudice" toward one of the antagonists in the Arab/Israeli Conflict. Unless, of course, Obama is nurturing an intense dislike of them pesky Joooos.... Who wouldda thunkit?

Big City Ultra-Left Dead-Trees Hemorrhaging Circulation & Revenues---per usual!

Editor & Publiasher may not have much of an audience as dwindling circ figures and plummeting revenues indicate the physical ink& paper media may be heading for what their hero called "the dustbin of history."

Good riddance to a herd of mindless Orwellian headless drones who are almost 100% pro-Democrat & pro-Big Government----perhaps this shiftless collection of middlebrow half-wits might be gunning for employment in functionary-heaven in DC after their places of employment evaporate like the gaseous political gibberish these papers emit on a daily basis.

Where are the Walter Lippmanns, the Eric Severeids, the Fred Friendlys and other men of stature and wisdom who rejected stampeding after the latest political nitwittery? The remote persona of Obama has gone unexamined and his background left uninvestigated because, as Vandehei & Harris at Politico put it:

It is not our impression that many reporters are rooting for Obama personally. To the contrary, most colleagues on the trail we’ve spoken with seem to find him a distant and undefined figure. But he has benefited from the idea that negative attacks that in a normal campaign would be commonplace in this year would carry an out-of-bounds racial subtext. That’s why Obama’s long association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was basically a nonissue in the general election.

So moral cowardice and fear of being called a racist has kept those intrepid ink-stained wretches from probing into the seamy underworld populated by foreign-born "financiers" like Rezko, racist pastors like Wright and Pfleger, and unrepentant terrorists like Ayers & Dohrn [who may have been Michelle's "mentor" at Sidley Austin, though we'll never know as the gutless cowards in journalism have sat this election out.]

Yes, telling truth to people who don't want to hear the truth can be costly, as an Orlando anchor questioning Biden rigorously about Obama's "spread-the-wealth" reparative justice found when her station was blacklisted by the same people who screech every time the Hollyweird Ten [many of whom were guilty as charged of wannabe treason] example comes up.

Anne Applebaum wrote persuasively about where such cowardice leads a people in her Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag.

Even now, pervs and RICO crime lords like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are planning their next move after destroying the American housing market. I exaggerate for emphasis, but not by much!

Obama bids fair to become the next worst president of the 21st century after Jimmy Carter polluted the 20th with his hapless four years of incompetent silliness in the Oval Office, tending the White House tennis court schedules while interest rates rose above 16%.

But happily, Pinch Sulz-bulger [after Billy & Whitey] will have completed the destruction of his family's legacy before long---although Jeff Immelt may reduce GE to penury before Pinch effs up his NYT family heirloom beyond repair.

Lying Cheating Far-Left Press Blames McCain/Palin for their Bias!!

Politico has a self-serving collection of bleats and whines that blame McCain for the bias of the ultra-left loons in the national media.

Most political journalists we know are centrists has got to be the funniest bit of nonsensical BS I have ever read. I carried a press pass for three years in DC to Congress & frequented the National Press Bldg & many functions with regularity. About 80% of the journalists there were totally committed to a leftish world view with all the trappings---change & opposition to the Republicans who at that time were in the White House [Reagan second term & GHWB first term].

SINCE THEN IT HAS BECOME MUCH WORSE!

Let's face it. Joe Biden is not presidential material, but like an old pair of shoes is familiar. My wife worked for Sen. Sarbanes as an Leg Asst & was privy to the Sen's thoughts, which were that his colleague on the Sen For Rel Cte good ol' Joe was a few apples short of a picnic and not the sharpest tool in the shed. And the national media rounds on Sarah Palin, who has more executive experience and experience at running a business than Biden & Obama together, as though she is a clueless nobody. She is a sitting governor with an 80% approval rating.

Since moving out of DC, I see the biases of the NYC/DC Left Coast Liberal Press more clearly than ever.

Obama has gone completely unvetted, and his relationships with Rezko, Wright, Ayers, & others are still coming to light despite the fact that the LA Times has a damaging tape on Obama. CBS 60 Minutes had an interview of Michelle Obama in which she claimed her husband might be shot "getting gas at a gas station" and other examples of victimization---this was aired in early 2007 & never surfaced during the Hillary campaign---although a chance remark by HRC in a small SD public affairs channel was trumpeted for a week because she said the Golden Fart Blossom might end up like RFK in '68. Where is the fairness in that?

Here in FL, we have Mark Foley's successor, a shit-for-brains with a bevy of mistresses he paid off & allegations involving compulsory phone sex from his EMPLOYEES in the middle of the night. And Foley was tarred & feathered for one or two suggestive e-mails aired on a now-you-see-it, now-it's-gone blog probably financed by the DNC. Not a peep in the US press about Mahoney, Maroney or whatever the creep's name is.

The American press SUCKS at the DNC tit! And gets pilloried when it asks stupid fool Biden a legitimate question about income redistribution.

The island of Manhattan could sink beneath the Atlantic along with the swamp on the Potomac, and the American people would be far better off than they are now.

UN Devoutly Hopes Obama Will Emasculate US Foreign Policy

Obama is the devout hope of the UN Commissar EU-nuch elites as our next president. Although John Bolton politely opines that it is the refusal of conservatives to "worship at the altar of New York" that offends the feckless eff-ups in the world's least efficient bureaucracy [save a few benighted hellholes in Africa like Zimbabwe]. However, during my time in IO/UNP at the State Dept, I found it was the fact that the US actually takes UN resolutions seriously, unlike the gelded eunuchs in the 'professional' bureaucracy---save for a few knight-errants who actually want to make a difference.

The reason among others that the US invaded Iraq was that Saddam had ignored 17 UN resolutions. Instead of praising the Bush Administration, as the UN had praised the US & NATO for intervening unilaterally in Bosnia and later in Serbia [after the UN troops---cowardly Dutch drunks---were chained to lampposts for the local males to bugger at will at Srebenice]. Or was that vice versa. At any rate, Clinton was PRAISED for bypassing the feckless moron Kofi Annan and getting the job done. The difference is that most of the UN SC & GA members are socialist at least in name & constitution, and they took BJ Clinton to be a closet member of their own corrupt elites.

However, George W. Bush represented the US Constitution and its independence from outside powers, no matter what a socialist candidate like Obama might construe it as in his existential riffs on its role in American society [basically, BHusseinO thinks it's holding back the US from redistribution of wealth---ala Venezuela].

And we all know that "redistribution of wealth" really means funneling the wealth of the rich to the political elites such as Obama represents [trial lawyers, teachers' unions, academicides, media moguls of the Hollyweird variety, corrupt Dem political machines in Chicago, Boston, NYC & the District of Columbia, and at the very very end of the queue, the parched [for booze] and starving [for drugs & sex] lazy sturdy beggars who are the Dem constituencies at the bottom of the elitist pyramid].

France tried this in 1789 and six republics, two empires, two monarchies & a nice quiet interlude under Hitler's thumb in the early forties later, France is still struggling to sort it out---tax collectors to the contrary nothwithstanding. Russia tried it in 1917 and political tyranny ensued for seventy-plus years---at a cost under Stalin alone of over fifty million USSR citizens sacrificed to Stalin's incompetence [vs. Hitler] and Gulag & collectivization & the Ukrainian forced famine & his many political terrors, including the decimation of the Soviet officer corps just before WWII. The People's Republic of Capitalism has emerged from Mao's terrorism on his own people which may have cost 100 million lives in Great Leaps and a Thousand Flowers and Cultural Revolting. Let's leave out Pol Pot & Fidel & Chavez & the Burmese Socialist Revolting & even Zimbabwe's thriving socialist economy where quintillions of Z-dollars exchange hands daily.

What the UN really hates is the success of US capitalism and their own serfhood under the gaze of a country which has been the largest producer of goods and services of any nation since 1880, and still produces over a quarter of the world's goods & services even while the Lilliputians of Turtle Bay try to tie down this giant with threads of gossamer verbiage.

And woe betide any country that is successful, as the US has finally been in Iraq, because that just makes the infantile moronic twits in the UN bureaucracy hiss & screech even more.

Obama Outed At Last==A "Reparative Redistributive Socialist" Who Hates the Constitution!

Obama bin Biden has finally been outed. The "Magic Negro" is actually a guy who will take from the rich and give it to the poor, who generally will shoot it into their arms or pour it down their throats or blow it at the poker table, or the craps games on the stairwells of Pruitt-Igoe which I saw many times in St. Louis before they demolished that previous monument to liberal moronity.

FedEx Chair Smith on the Economy, Stupid!

Fred Smith has a lot of kids and his youngest son, Cannon [Fred Jr.] is a redshirt freshman third-string QB for the Miami Hurricanes. Last year, he was in a math class with my daughter and they ended up texting each other for a while---however, my daughter's boy-friend is a former linebacker who hates QBs and that relationship with young Cannon is currently moribund, if not room temperature.

Niki only met Cannon's dad, "Frederick," at a restaurant during the Doral Open when Fred Smith was presiding over the FedEx Cup rites during golf's biggest race for the moola. Oh yeah, Fred Smith is also Co-Chair of the McCain Campaign. Here's Fred:

....the country is going to get through this and the financial markets will stabilize," he assures me, but only after we go through a period of "trauma and readjustment."

I ask him just what he means by "trauma." He attributes the financial crisis to "the intersection of four long-term developments." Reckless mortgage lending policies; high energy prices; mark-to-market accounting rules; and national policies that favor what he calls "the financial sector over the industrial sector."

"Rather than in our business where you have to have a dollar of equity for, 10 cents or 15 cents of debt," he explains, "it's exactly the opposite in the financial sector where you have one dollar of equity for 10, 25, 50 times risk." "Things became so flipped upside down," he explains, that "the assets at these banks became the liabilities and the liabilities became the assets. These people were making these fantastic returns -- at places like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- but in reality they weren't adding a lot of value. I have said time and again that there is a fundamental tendency in good times in the financial sector to over-leverage. Our national policies actively encouraged all this debt."

How so? "The United States has a completely uncompetitive tax structure in general and it has a particularly onerous tax structure for firms that are asset-intensive. If you run an industrial company like FedEx, which employs 290,000 folks, most of whom are blue-collar people, the way we have to run this business is to equip those workers with billions of dollars of assets that allow them to pick up and deliver millions of things around the world."

His theory is that the tax bias against capital explains why so much top U.S. talent got whisked off to become investment bankers. "Not too many young people coming out of school are studying to be production managers at General Motors." He says that most of FedEx's first line managers come not from the top flight universities, but out of community colleges and the military. "The top talent has wanted to go to Wall Street."

He has come to hold the get-rich-quick Wall Street financiers in more than a little disdain. He views the heroes of the U.S. economy as the companies that actually produce real goods and services. He sees the Wall Street collapse as an inevitable byproduct of investment bankers building multitrillion dollar debt pyramid structures.

So how do we fix this problem and retool our industrial sector in a pro-competitive fashion? "We've got to reduce the taxes on equity. Let companies expense their capital purchases."

He uses an example from FedEx. "Look, our capital budget as we went into this year was about $3 billion. We went out to Boeing in July for our board meeting to see the new triple seven, [the Boeing 777] which we have bought. If we had a lower corporate tax rate with the ability to expense capital expenditures, guess what? We'd buy more triple sevens. We absolutely have to cut the corporate tax. Our current tax rate is about 38%. Even Germany has a 25% rate." [my emph]

We turn to the election. Mr. Smith is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of John McCain among the Fortune 50 CEOs. When I ask why, he says instantly: "Because I agree with him on trade, taxes, energy and health care."

Next I ask Mr. Smith about the class warfare theme of the political debate. "The politicians deplore the fact that we have a disparity of income," he says, but "the only way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure. So the more you tax capital, the more you hurt workers." He estimates that about 70% of the return from FedEx capital expenditures is captured by workers in the form of higher wages as their productivity rises.

He sees a big problem in that so few Americans now pay any income tax. "We're now at a point where a very large part of the population pays no federal income tax at all. When you have a majority of the population that realizes that you can transfer money from the productive to themselves, that's one of the great questions for the future of civilization, as far as I'm concerned."

As for CEO pay, Mr. Smith concedes that in some cases corporate management pay scales have gotten far out of line with shareholder interests. But he is quick to add: "I don't think anybody begrudges somebody making a large amount of money as long as it benefits everyone else. The problem is when they make a large amount of money and the shareholders get clobbered." As he sees it, "There's only one solution, and that is for a competent board of directors to oversee managers and give them incentives which are long-term in nature and which are irrevocably tied to the fortunes of the shareholders."

........Considering FedEx's world-wide operations, and its rapid expansion in China, it occurs to me that there is perhaps no other company in the world more dependent on international trade. Sure enough, Fred Smith is a fanatical supporter of free trade. So much so that he says, "I think the best thing the United States could do is to unilaterally disarm. It should open up markets. The agricultural subsidies are terrible. They're just immoral."

On economic grounds, he continues, "I think the history is very clear, that trade is the main reason that the world has enjoyed the prosperity. Look at China. They've drug hundreds of millions of people out of poverty through trade."

Trade aside, no issue is of greater consequence to FedEx than energy policy. FedEx consumes 1.3 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, and is the largest user of energy in the world next to the U.S. military. Mr. Smith sits on the board of the Energy Security Leadership Council, which issued a report a few months ago advocating a huge expansion of domestic energy supply. How do we do this?

"Two things," he insists. "The first is we should maximize oil production in the United States in every respect. Everything, offshore, Alaska, shale, nonconventional, coal to liquid, gas to liquid, and nuclear. Let the market work.

"Second, and this is where I am an apostate on the free market, and also where I disagree in the main with, with Boone Pickens," Mr. Smith adds. "The United States has only one real way to reduce our dependence on foreign petroleum, in terms of reducing demand while we're increasing our domestic supply, and that is to electrify the short haul transportation system, to go to battery powered cars. The technology that brought us laptops and cell phones has reached a point where these lithium ion batteries can now produce cars like the Chevy Volt and the new plug-in Toyota Prius." Many FedEx trucks are already using this technology, though he admits they aren't yet cost efficient but are 42% more fuel efficient.

Mr. Smith ends our interview with a little sermon about what the U.S. must do to retain its global economic superpower status. "Many of our current policies are not conducive to continued economic leadership. We restrict immigration when we have thousands of highly educated people that want to come to the United States, and some of our greatest corporations [are] crying out that we don't have the scientific talent that we need to develop the next generation of innovations and inventions . . .

"That's where all wealth comes from . . . It's not from the government. It's from invention and entrepreneurship and innovation. And our policies promote a legal and regulatory system which impedes our ability to grow entrepreneurship. Lastly, if we want to make [America's workers] wealthier we have to quit demonizing quote, big corporations."

And what about the marxist opponent of McCain who believes BIG GOVERNMENT is the end-all and be-all of a thriviing economy"

....I ask Mr. Smith if he's communicated these ideas directly to Barack Obama. "I haven't met Barack Obama," he replies. "He's certainly a charismatic fellow and well-spoken. I just disagree with him on trade and taxes and energy and health care."

Wise words, but wisdom is out of fashion in an election cycle ruled by snarky blog-led economically-illiterate marxist media mavens.

Joe The Plumber's Personal Info Illegally Taken From Ohio State Records: 1984 twenty-five years late?

Sam Joe Wurzelbacher's driver's license and tax info were lifted---possibly illegally---from the state records of Ohio shortly after he asked Obama some embarrassing questions.

Is this the beginning of the suppression of opposition that socialist governments normally pursue after gaining power? I myself worry that it could be.....

Talk radio and Fox TV will probably be "investigated" by Congress shortly after an Obama victory and the suppression of the truth that proponents of the BIG LIE [Obama's Hope & Change Chicanery] will ensue thereafter.

Bloggers beware, especially if we didn't adore the First Crime Lord before he was elected.

Palin Praised by Lorne Michaels of SNL

Dan Henninger has a short & sweet appraisal of the abominable corruption of America's media and the professional political class that can swallow a camel like Biden with no qualms, yet strains ferociously at the gnat of Sarah Palin, the freshest and most interesting new face in American politics in the last two and a half decades---[Bill Clinton comes to mind, Obama does not]. Here's Daniel:

The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is that she doesn't qualify for admission to the national political fraternity. Boy, that's rich. Behold the shabby frat house that says it's above her pay grade.


NBC
Sarah Palin appears with Lorne Michaels on Saturday Night Live.
Congress has the lowest approval rating ever registered in the history of polling (12%!). She isn't the reason polls are showing people want the entire Congress fired, with many telling pollsters they themselves could do a better job.

Sarah Palin didn't design a system of presidential primaries whose length and cost ensures that only the most obsessional personalities will run the gauntlet, while a long list of effective governors don't run.

These rules have wasted the electorate's time the past three presidential elections, by filling the debates with such zero-support candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.

Out of this process has fallen a Democratic nominee who entered the U.S. Senate in 2005 fresh off a stint in the Illinois state legislature, with next to no record of political accomplishment. He may be elected mainly because, in Colin Powell's word, he is thought to be "transformational." One may hope so.

By not bothering to look very deeply at the details beneath either candidate's governing proposals, the media have created a lot of downtime to take free kicks at Gov. Palin. My former colleague, Tunku Varadarajan, has compiled a glossary of Palin invective, and I've added a few: "Republican blow-up doll," "idiot," "Christian Stepford wife," "Jesus freak," "Caribou Barbie," "a dope," "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," "liar," "a national disgrace" and "her pretense that she is a woman."

Henninger notes with dripping sarcasm:

If as Joe Biden suggests the U.S. is likely to be tested by a foreign enemy next year, who of the following would you rather have dealing with it in the Oval Office: Nancy (of Damascus) Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Joe (the U.S. drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon) Biden, Mike Huckabee, Geraldine Ferraro, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter or Sarah Palin?
My pick? Gov. Palin, surely the most grounded, common-sense person on that list of prime-time politicians.

The despicable guttersnipes rounding on Sarah Palin range from hoity-toity Upper East Side Rockefeller Republicans like David Brooks and Peggy Noonan to loathsome sewer rodents and cucaracha ethnics like Rangel and Olberman and sport-of-nature Maddow---the Air America of cable TV. All impugning Palin on all levels, from being "vulgar" from a divorced childless crone socialite like Noonan who probably hates Palin's large family to odious idiots like Tweety Bird, Odorboy, and a whole gauntlet of careerist climbers like Andiarrhea Mitchell---who want to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. But Lorne Michaels [and surprisingly Annette Bening] have different takes on Palin, despite political differences:

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "Saturday Night Live," lives on the forward wave of American life. This week he gave his view of Sarah Palin to EW.com: "I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful. Her politics aren't my politics. But you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her."

Hmm.... Lorne ain't sayin' that to win friends on Manhattan Island, a cemetery of mummified political fossils. Or in the Loony-Tune LA Basin, populated by people with cartoons between their ears.

Don't Just Ask About Palin, Where's Joe, the Gaffe Machine?

Joe Biden is becoming "the gift that keeps on giviing" to the faltering McCain Campaign.

a story from CBS News’ Ryan Corsaro who noted that Biden has not taken questions from his press corps for six weeks.

“The handful of reporters from Biden’s national press corps who have followed him incessantly for two months have not had the opportunity to ask questions regarding the “crisis” matter - even to allow Biden to clarify his remarks - because he has not taken questions or held a press availability with his press corps since Sept. 7.”

Hillary

Corsaro also notes that Biden hasn’t taken questions from the public in awhile — since September 10. And what happened then? Biden “endorsed” Hillary Clinton.

“She’s qualified to be president of the United States of America and easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America. And quite frankly, it might have been a better pick than me,” he told the crowd.

Easy to understand

It’s not rocket science why this is happening writes ABC’s Jake Tapper.

“It might not be hard to imagine why this has happened. Biden’s proclivity to speak his mind has provided much fodder for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Republicans…,” writes Tapper. Both Tapper and Corsaro note that Sarah Palin has been much more accessible to the press. Maybe even the most accessible out of the four candidates, ponders Tapper. [my emph]

Meanwhile, on a happier note, the NYT brand CONTINUES TO PLUMMET as Pinch Sulz-bulger runs the brand into the sewer politically. Hopefully, the Old Grey Slut will be dead in five years.

AP & IBD/TIPP Polls Have Race in Dead Heat!

And the latest AP poll still has the race at a dead heat! As does an IBD/TIPP poll.

It demonstrates the now-ridiculous bias of the "liberal" newsies-pressies-emptyheads-talking/writing their gibberish on how big Obama's victory will be. These airhead/ditzes and dorks actually believe their own puke-spew on how mean and dishonorable McCain is to actually point out that Obama hangs out with [Black] racists, terrorists, anti-Semites, and other economic criminals like Barney Frank, whose "husband" was VP of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the early years of their RICO reign of extortion/bribery to get Jimmie Carter's oaf-head CRA goals established.

And Sarah Palin gets heat while consummate gaffer JOE BIDEN is ten times the total fool that the Dems and their Repub Rats [Brooks, Murphy, Noonan, Parker et al] make Sarah out to be. BTW, RINO Rats named above are all Upper East Side Contemptible Rodents looking to remain safely ensconced in the cocoon of NYC salon set parlour parleys with Baba Wawa & other Contemptible Rodents of the Dem persuasion. Davey B wouldn't want his NYT Op-Ed pulpit threatened.

Biden's complete oafish idiocy has caused him to be reined in twice now for retuning his strangely truthful story lines. [Joe knows that Obama will screw up terribly in the first year despite media ravings and then a huge backlash will develop---only Joe was stupid enuf to admit it out loud. And Joe knows that Obama is a wimpy tyro on foreign policy and will probably eff-up big-time, so he tells us we should cut the slacker some slack!!!] Yet he gets protection from Andiarrhea Mitchell and others at MSN[D]NC who thankfully have ratings in the toilet.

Kirsten Powers certainly has buffoon Biden firmly in her sights, pointing out the obvious bias.

And of course, the MSM has not noted that Foley's successor has now been outed in multiple affairs using campaign money to hush up his ex-girl friends and gets not a single story in the national press while a MN Congresswoman rightfully calls Obama a threat to America and gets accused of everything---double standard is the old term for a media monopoly controlled by the DNC. Bachmann was foooolish to go on the MSNBC mousetrap gauntlet-run, and should have been much more on guard with Tweety-Bird who wants to re-establish cred with his socialist masters.

Foley got caught by an anonymous blogger who disappeared after displaying a couple of suggestive e-mails. Maloney is caught spending hundreds of thousands in hush money and gets no media reprimand.

WTF is going on?

It looks like this fellow has figured it out. I'll bet he'll never get praised for telling the truth---in fact, I expect him to be attacked for it!!!

POSTSCRIPTI do know one thing. I would rather be called vulgar by silly snob Noonan who is a sixty-year old divorcee clinging to her social status in East Side salons than to desert my family.

Gaffe-Prone Biden's Latest Goof Covered Up by Compliant DNC, oops, MSM

Even Dan Rather admits to a ginormous double standard as Joe Biden, the most preposterous Vice Presidential candidate in the race this year, inserts his foot into his mouth for the umpteenth time this election year. Old Dan, no friend of the right-wing media, speculates on what would have happened had Sarah Palin made the same stupid statement Biden emitted, and guessed it would be on the top-fold, front-page. Of course, Biden's moronic nocturnal emissions were nowhere to be found in the NYT or WaPo or the other pilot fish of the left-wing newsies, happily losing circulation so rapidly that their imbecilities are digging their economic graves. Mika Brzezinski is clueless as usual, wondering on MSNBC if the story is so important if she can't find it in the Post or Times. She is dumber than she looks, and she looks real dumb.

Joe Scarborough comes to the rescue, sort of, of the dismal damsel Mika's distress---he hints that the faint possibility exists that the media may be biased against McCain/Palin, a thought that has never passed through the empty head of the Polish bozette.

Andrea Mitchell disgraces herself as well, when she counters Nancy Pfotenberger [sp?] questions about NBC's honesty with a captious grunt about not needing editing advice. Methinks Andrea needs a remedial ethics course in journalism [only not at Columbia, where students devised a method of cheating at open-book ethics course tests!!!] This, of course, went unreported by the MSM, and only crept into the blogosphere, since the left-wing journalists all cover each others' exposed asses, a very wide expanse exposed to be sure.

Deluge of New New Deal Means Big Government Interference on the Economy

Professor Paul Rubin at Emory describes the awful cascade of lies and intrusive government already lined up after a Democrat victory:

The new president's response was to restructure the economy with the New Deal -- an expansion of the role of government once unimaginable in America. We now know that FDR's policies likely prolonged the Great Depression because the economy never fully recovered in the 1930s, and actually got worse in the latter half of the decade. And we know that FDR got away with it (winning election four times) by blaming his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, for crashing the economy in the first place.

Read Amity Schlaes book The Forgotten Man: A New History of The Great Depressionfor an extended excursion through Roosevelt's flimflammery. Prof. Rubin points out that hyper-liberal Obama will employ a completely corrupt media to bolster his spurious planning when it inevitably becomes harmful to the economy. There is a whole playbook Obama can benefit from:

He'll blame Republicans for having caused the market crash in the first place, and so escape blame for the consequences of his policies. It worked for FDR and, so far in this campaign, blaming Republicans and George W. Bush has worked for Mr. Obama.

And Prof Rubin notes that the buffoon Al Gore [D+ on his only science course in religious school!] will marshal the gullible victims of delusional hysteria into action:

Even before the current crisis, there was a great demand for increased government regulation to limit global warming. That gives the next president a ready-made box in which to place more regulation, and a legion of supports eager for it.

The reason that these specious claims will gain widespread support comes from the fact that most Americans suffer from an educational system that indoctrinates rather than educates students into critical thinking skills. And Rubin notes that the proprietary tapeworms employed by the Democrat Party are suffused with victimization and non-productive employment skills which exacerbate and cause confrontation rather than build a more perfect union:

Democrats draw their political power from trial lawyers, unions, government bureaucrats, environmentalists, and, perhaps, my liberal colleagues in academia. All of these voting blocs seem to favor a larger, more intrusive government. If things proceed as they now appear likely to, we can expect major changes in policies that benefit these groups.

Prof. Rubin is probably correct in his assessment of the outcome of a "New New Deal" that will be just as unsuccessful as the old New Deal:

If those of us who favor free markets for the freedom and prosperity they bring are right, the political system may soon put our economy on track for a catastrophe.

Meet the new hoax, bigger than the old hoax.

MSM Studiously Ignore Evidence that McCain is Within 2 Points of Obama!

The SELF-DESTRUCTIVE DEMS are not paying attention. Ohio is a point ahead for McCain, but the Thundering Herd MSM cattle drive refuses to pay attention, instead prattling on about how the Powell [and Murphy & Noonan] defections spell doom for McCain. The Polls are ALWAYS far ahead for the Democrats

The fools in the mission control center of DNC [oops, MSM] never DO LEARN. They think that proclaiming victory and having preposterous bimbos like Pelosi say ["Obama is 100% sure to win"] will actually cause this to happen. It may, but the American people smell the garbage and lies bulldozed forward by the MSM/DNC & may decide at the last minute to eject the EU-nuch C&C engineers.

Remember how Reagan was half a dozen ponts behind in 1980 up to the last week, then the country made a massive jump/shift toward sanity and away from the moronic peanut farmer?

In 1980, Ronald Reagan beat Carter by nearly 10 points, 51 percent to 41 percent. In a Gallup Poll released days before the election on Oct. 27, it was Carter who led Reagan 45 percent to 42 percent.

Hmmm..... And now the Dems will shriek in their womanish screechings that the election was stolen.

MAYBE SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THE POLLS?

Sarah Gets More Support from Unexpected Sources---First, Annette Bening & Now Alessandra Stanley

When Sarah's name comes under ridicule, I keep wondering if these writers and critics and polipundits have noticed Joe Biden making a fool of himself on a daily basis. I also recall how serious men with gravitas like George Ball once told me that Ronald Reagan was not qualified to be president, because he was a "mere entertainer."

And Sarah's Dude Appeal knocks the average white athletic handyman male out of his socks, as the link here amply demonstrates. Even Alec Baldwin was not faking it when he mentioned on SNL that Sarah is "much hotter in person."

Gallup Daily Remains Virtually Tied

The MSM is already talking as though Obama is elected. The NYT this Sunday morning is chock-full of stories on how Obama will be a new broom and how its own faked rigged skewed polls show Obama way ahead.

The reality behind all the smoke and mirrors is being obscured so as to:

1] Discourage McCain Contributions

2] Discourage possible McCain voters from showing up to vote---the barrage of negative news on TV and the living-fossil print press is designed to make Obama seem inevitable. I've seen this movie at least half-a-dozen times in close races.

3] Promote an illusory "tidal wave" of voters for Obama, whereas Karl Rove correctly notes that BHusseinO has not yet closed the deal, made the sale, and all the verbal calisthenics of the NYT & the Chicago Mafia outliers [including gnarled gnome George Will], all the pyrotechnics of celebtard endorsements, all the huffing and puffing of so-called "moderate" straw men like Powell and the unctiously moronic Gergen, all these exercises in flimflammery will not convince, or at least have yet to convince, the average American.

4] Denigrate the McCain/Palin ticket with every sleazy weapon in the libtard arsenal, as the NYT did yesterday to Cindy McCain, and tried to do with a Ms. Iseman early this year. Pinch Sulz-bulger [reference to Mass family of pol/crimelord] is ordering his army of orcs and subterranean worm farm inhabitants to keep bulldozing piles of sludge against the McCain ticket [after endorsing McCain in lat '07]. When the NYT Editorial called McCain a "racist" for linking Obama to white terrorist Bill Ayers, the complete insanity and hysterical nuttiness of the Old Grey Aunt in the Attic was on full display.

5] Conversely, praise Obama & the compulsively silly Biden for policies which don't exist except on the backs of napkins. For every faux pas that Palin commits, Biden has ten major gaffes that simply point out his inability to speak and think at the same time.

6] Accuse McCain & Palin of racism every time they make any comment about Obama's shady past associations.

I'm sure I've left out a few more principles of the Democrat-dirt-machine, but it's the Lord's Day and why fill it with examples of Democrat hatred and dishonesty. All these will be repeated every day next week and the week after that until the election just over a fortnight away.

Let's see what the Dem RICO Crime Spree can concoct between now and then.

What Else is Joe The Plumber Hiding From the American People?

Slate's Josh Levin has a tongue-in-cheek put-down of the ridiculous smear jobs the ultra-left MSM spews towards Joe or Sam Wurzel- or Worzel-whomever. Samples:

A series of receipts uncovered today reveal that Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher launched his career in the home of former Weather Underground leader William Ayers. In 1995, Ayers contacted Wurzelbacher, then still an apprentice plumber, to fix a leaky faucet in his Hyde Park home. After earning high marks from the one-time domestic terrorist, "Joe the Plumber" built a thriving practice with Ayers' referrals to the Trinity United Church of Christ and the Chicago chapter of al-Qaida.
—Bloomberg News, Oct. 17, 2008

Samuel J. Wurzelbacher today admitted responsibility for the mysterious bulge in President George W. Bush's back during 2004's first presidential debate. "I was feeding him lines," Wurzelbacher confessed to a group of reporters outside a Toledo plumbing-supply store. "Everyone thinks it was Karl Rove talking into that earpiece, but he had a pinochle game with Ahmed Chalabi on Friday nights."

—USA Today, Oct. 22, 2008
Prototypes for Palm Beach County's infamous butterfly ballot have been found in the tool belt of Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher. The shocking discovery was made on Thursday as part of a weekslong Department of Justice investigation into alleged voter fraud perpetrated by Mr. Wurzelbacher. A search of Florida records indicates that the celebrity plumber voted 537 separate times in the 2000 presidential election. "There's nothing we could've done—you can spell Wurzelbacher too many different ways," said former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
—USA Today, Oct. 23, 2008

A DNA test has confirmed that "Joe the Plumber," the everyvoter who rose to fame thanks to repeated mentions in last week's presidential debate, is the father of Sarah Palin's 6-month-old son, Trig. In the highest-rated episode in the history of Maury, the Alaska governor confronted blue-collar Ohioan Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher for failing to acknowledge paternity. Upon hearing that he was, in fact, the father, Wurzelbacher stormed off the stage without comment, as Palin repeatedly shouted, "I told you! I told you!" while wagging her right index finger at the studio audience.
—New York Times, Oct. 31, 2008

The White House Plumbers—the team of operatives that perpetrated the Watergate break-in on behalf of President Richard Nixon—were the brainchild of Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, according to new reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. A source identified only as "Deep Basin Wrench" tells the veteran Washington Post reporters that Wurzelbacher had it out for the Democratic Party. Also, he's a Muslim.
—Associated Press, Nov. 1, 2008

AP/Yahoo Poll Too Close to Call: 873 Dems & 650 Repubs!!!

Obama may be preparing a victory party and stupid EU-nuchland pundits may have declared him victor, but like the Red Sox 7 runs down with two out in the seventh, two strikes on Pedroia----you never can tell, can you.

The poll above is another straw in the wind---Zogby, Rasmussen, Gallup, AP/Yahoo all within margin of error.

Forget about the NYT poll---we all know that one is rigged.

Why Do Women Hate Palin?

Peggy Noonan continues her diatribe against Sarah Palin. She makes some semi-valid points, but she forgets that in comparison to Joe Biden, Sarah Palin ain't so bad at all. And her Upper East Side New Yorker bitchiness condescends and disparages any language that is not "adult," whatever that is.

My daughter tells me that she and her friends, most of whom are Jewish, all like Sarah Palin and admire her as a person because she actually had a small business and she is first mate on her husband's fishing boat during the salmon season. And she has kids, oops, I forgot---she has children, one of whom is a Down Syndrome child who has a soul just like the snooty lace-curtain Irish snob Noonan.

I once got close to a woman who is now a Senior Vice President of Shell Oil. She told me that women are much more bitchy and harsh towards other women than towards men---almost to a point of pathology. She thought it had something to do with an unexamined inner competition for men, plus the green-eyed evil of envy.

Whatever the reason, Noonan should rise above her parochial, gilded-cage elitism and recognize that most Americans want to feel that their leaders empathize with them. Yes, Sarah is a work in progress and a bit too enthusiastic for jaded cynics like Noonan---maybe she isn't an avid auto-didact as Truman was, a man who knew more history and philosophy than the New York-snob FDR, truly a parochial child of wealth and privilege who got his gentlemen's C's at Harvard and coasted all his life. A "chameleon on plaid," much like the utterly untested and untried Sen. Obama.

Why Noonan doesn't note Obama's dearth of experience and Biden's serial goofiness demonstrates again the clubby elitism of the Left Coasts and their outposts in Chicago and other large urban moral sewers of PC insanity.

Noonan, her buddy Murphy, and other lace-curtain Irish should listen to Joe the Plumber. And remember that recently in France, it was fear of the Polish Plumber that caused the French to veto signing on to the EU-nuch constitution.

A Look at Fannie Mae back in the Clinton Years

Matt Cooper of more recent fame as a participant of the Plamegate follies, has a thoughtful piece a decade ago on the Hyperscam that FanFred eventually turned out to be.

Obama Scam on Acorn has to be Confronted by McCain!

The WSJ has another editorial on what is becoming the most completely fraudulent attempt to steal an election since the 19th c. John McCain is in the process of being serially buffaloed by the MSM punditocracy into "taking the high road" and ignoring the clear systematic RICO-crimes being committed in state after state designed at the very least to throw volunteer poll workers into a tizzy on election day, when Dem ambulance-chasing ghoulish creeps [AKA lawyers] will be waiting to rush to the precinct booths to declare "irregularities." At the same time, when volunteers for Repub poll watchers are missing due to nobody volunteering in out-of-the-way precincts, ACORN moles take their place in perfect bad faith in order to okay all disputed ballots---almost all of which will be for Obama, a former legal counsel to ACORN who now claims that like Ayers, Wright, and his white grandma, they mean hardly anything at all to him----"just people he knew in the neighborhood." [Like his dying mother, whom he couldn't go south to see because of "scheduling conflicts."]

When is John McCain, who started this sort of do-gooder stuff gone terribly wrong with McCain/Feingold, going to man up and confront Obama---maybe on the stage tomorrow in Nashville?

Let's see which Johnny Mack shows up. If he just prowls the stage and mouths pious exhalations, it's curtains and he might as well quit and default.

Bret Stephans in WSJ: Wish I'd Said That!

Here is Bret Stephans on the world economy and EU-nuch notables crowing over the US financial troubles with their usual Schadenfreude---I love it when the GERMANS accuse the US of trying to take over the world!! [Just rented Downfall, and got lots of Schadenfreude myself at the glorious demise of Adolf and his unheroic cowardly crew in THE BUNKER]. Here's some of Bret's pellucid analysis:

when the tide laps at Gulliver's waistline, it usually means the Lilliputians are already 10 feet under. Before yesterday's surge, the Dow had dropped 25% in three months. But that only means it had outperformed nearly every single major foreign stock exchange, including Germany's XETRADAX (down 28%) China's Shanghai exchange (down 30%), Japan's NIKK225 (down 37%), Brazil's BOVESPA (down 41%) and Russia RTSI (down 61%). These contrasts are a useful demonstration that America's financial woes are nobody else's gain.

On the other hand, global economic distress doesn't invariably work at cross-purposes with American interests. Hugo Chávez's nosedive toward bankruptcy begins when oil dips below $80 a barrel, the price where it hovers now. An identical logic, if perhaps at a different price, applies to the petrodictatorships in Moscow and Tehran, which already are heavily saddled with inflationary and investor-confidence concerns. Russia will also likely burn through its $550 billion in foreign-currency reserves faster than anticipated -- a pleasing if roundabout comeuppance for last summer's Georgian adventure.

Nor does the U.S. seem all that badly off, comparatively speaking, when it comes to its ability to finance a bailout. Last month's $700 billion bailout package seems staggeringly large, but it amounts to a little more than 5% of U.S. gross domestic product. Compare that to Germany's $400 billion to $536 billion rescue package (between 12% and 16% of its GDP), or Britain's $835 billion plan (30%).

Of course it may require considerably more than $700 billion to clean out our Augean Stables. But here it helps that the ratio of government debt to GDP in the U.S. runs to about 62%. For the eurozone, it's 75%; for Japan, 180%.

It also helps that the U.S. continues to have the world's largest inflows of foreign direct investment; that it ranks third in the world (after Singapore and New Zealand) for ease of doing business, according to the World Bank; and that its demographic trends aren't headed toward a tall and steep cliff -- as they are in the EU, Russia, Japan and China.

The US still produces over one quarter of the world's goods and services and remains a business-friendly environment---unlike the rules-clogged EU-nuch economy which drives its gnomes to buy homes in Florida to get away from pesky tax assessors in EU-nuchland. The arteries of the old continent are clotted with obstructions to business and common sense.

Read the whole article, which is eminent good sense in the face of silly puffballs blowing from across the pond.

Chavez Bankrupts Venezuela by Discounting Oil to all but USA

The Daily Telegraph has a great article on the almost economically suicidal behavior Chavez has forced PvVSA, the giant state oil company, to adopt as two-tiered pricing and massive corruption cut into Venezuela's exports of oil & gasoline.

The US is the only export-venue which pays full price for its oil imports from Venezuela [ditto for the Venezuelan coal which is supplied to FPL in its coal-fired electricity-generating plants, I assume.] Chavez's insane social agenda has contributed mightily to the degeneration of the country's oil industry:

The state oil company, PDVSA, produced 3.2 million barrels per day in 1998, the year before Mr Chavez won the presidency. After a decade of rising corruption and inefficiency, daily output has now fallen to 2.4 million barrels, according to OPEC figures. About half of this oil is now delivered at a discount to Mr Chavez's friends around Latin America. The 18 nations in his "Petrocaribe" club, founded in 2005, pay Venezuela only 30 per cent of the market price within 90 days, with rest in instalments spread over 25 years.
The other half - 1.2 million barrels per day - goes to America, Venezuela's only genuinely paying customer.
Meanwhile, Mr Chavez has given PDVSA countless new tasks. "The new PDVSA is central to the social battle for the advance of our country," said Rafael Ramirez, the company's president and the minister for petroleum. "We have worked to convert PDVSA into a key element for the social battle."
The company now grows food after Mr Chavez's price controls emptied supermarket shelves of products like milk and eggs. Another branch produces furniture and domestic appliances in an effort to stem the flow of imports. What PDVSA seems unable to do is produce more oil.
Venezuela has proven reserves of 80 billion barrels, but estimates suggest that it may possess 142 billion barrels - more than anywhere else except Saudi Arabia. But the crude is of low quality and must be upgraded before it can be shipped. There are only three upgrade units currently operating, processing only 600,000 barrels per day.
"There is a bottleneck in the Venezuelan production system," said Mazhar al-Sheridah, 68, an oil expert at the Central University of Venezuela. "It will cost at least $32 billion to build another three upgrading units and take some five years, meaning that Venezuelan production is stuck at current levels for a while yet."
All this means that Venezuela has missed much of the benefit from the oil boom and, now that prices are falling, Mr Chavez faces huge financial problems. Nobody is sure at what point his government would be unable to pay its bills, but most sources consulted believe this would probably happen if oil falls to $80 a barrel. Yesterday, oil was trading at $79.80.

Which means that either the netbacks and corrupt bilateral deals will stop, lessening the fat buffoon's regional influence, or he will insist on running the country into bankruptcy.

Happily,Russia also is suffering from the same oil-price plunge and will have to trim its sails and keep master poisoner Putin from wreaking more harm.

In this financial crisis, some silver linings abound.

Islamic Loon Pronounces "Death of Capitalism," Urges Rakah.

Premature Ejaculation is not confined merely to Der Spiegel, the leftist glossy rag that continually pronounces the USA at the end of its Superpower status [which is, of course, quickly picked up by MoDoDodo who also pronounced us in a "quagmire" when a sandstorm held up the US invasion short of Baghdad for a couple of days five years past.]

Back in the eighties I spent a short stint working with Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud on something called "Islamic Banking," designed to soak up the dirhams and riyals hidden under bedsteads and inside pillows among devout Muslims. No usury, but a sophisticated system of netbacks was the incentive which drove the initiative, pronounced hilal by the home-team Sharia Ulema of the Nejd, doubtless with the assistance of a little palm-grease from the son of former King Faisal.

Maybe the same cowards who tried to conquer Europe in the last century two times will succumb to Islam---it's what they deserve.

Cuba Starves While Castro Pontificates on US Elections

The moronic egomaniac ruling the imprisoned slave-state, oops, workers' paradise, spews his usual nonsense while food rations are being distributed as his island cannot feed itself.

Meanwhile, the two chief enemies of capitalism in the USA are planning to be joined by a third socialist in the White House after Nov. 4th, a person who will be elected by massive vote fraud financed in part by the Dem Party's illegal arm, called ACORN, already being investigated in several key "battleground states."

After these lunatics take over the asylum, they will effectively cripple political opposition by enacting a "Fairness Doctrine" to impair the only venue of opposition, since the majority of literate Americans detest their philosophy, but the hyperliterate hysterics on the two left coasts will enable the fake registrations for voting and hamper other institutions like private education to make their country look more like Venezuela.

I expect the House's first order of business will be to renege on offshore drilling and to stop building any fences to keep out illegal immigrants, who can be mustered by ACORN to register under fake IDs and perpetuate a "people's democracy" like those of Chavez and Castro.

I can't wait to move offshore if there will be a sane place to live after the USA goes socialist.

Connect The Dots....Presto, Obama is Indicted For Rezko Crimes

Patrick Fitzgerald may spring the trap. After his failed expedition to nail Karl Rove, he may be close to having odious creep Tony Rezko blow former state treasurer Giannoiulias, Governor Blagojevich, and Senator Barack Obama. Barack has so far been immunized by the MSM from the many crimes he knowingly participated in during the NORMAL COURSE of Chicago politics! Here's some of the gooood stuff:

1) Michael Sneed in her Sun Times column 10/10/08 had the following tidbit:

Sneed hears rumbles political fund-raiser/fixer Tony Rezko, who is now singing sweetly to the feds from his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, has been talking about his “dealings” with a Chicago bank, which has political connections.

(2) We just spoke with someone well-connected in Chicago politics who told us that the bank Sneed is talking about has to be Broadway Bank, which is owned by the politically-connected Giannoulias family. We were told that Sneed’s column confirms rumblings people we know heard independently that Tony Rezko is giving up the Giannoulias family to Patrick Fitzgerald — Rezko and the Giannoulias family are as close and tied together as anyone in Chicago could be. If Rezko is turning on them, then Rezko is going to give up Governor Rod Blagojevich and Obama too.

We don’t want to end up in cement shoes for implying anything here, but if you live in Chicago for any length of time, you hear rumors about Broadway Bank, the Giannoulias family, and insert Tony Soprano references here. Kapeech?

(3) So, Rezko is singing about the Giannoulias family and its longtime “business dealings” in Chicago, which would interest someone like Fitzgerald and the Justice Department, who have had a long ambition to crack Soprano-style business dealings in Chicago (the city known for Al Capone hasn’t changed much, really). The next plate to drop in this will be Fitzgerald then leaning on the Giannoulias family to give up someone bigger than them, who Fitzgerald once discussed in terms of hoping “he has the morals to do the right thing”, to paraphrase. We now believe that person Fitz was talking about is Barack Obama.

(4) The Giannoulias family was involved with Obama as far back as his first state senate campaign in 1996. It has been long rumored here in Chicago that Obama obtained a sweetheart deal on his first town home here in Chicago — which he could not have afforded otherwise — and guess who the financing came from for that house? We’ve been told it was Broadway Bank, the Giannoulias bank. Now, this sets up a scenario where the Giannoulias family helps Obama with his campaign finances and gets him deeper in their pocket with his sweetheart mortgage deal (for the first home he owned that he could not afford) – all in exchange for quid pro quo to be determined later.

(5) One favor political Chicago claims Obama did for the Giannoulias family was in 2006 when, out of the blue, 29 year old Alexi Giannoulias, with no experience, and without ever having voted before, decides to run for State Treasurer of Illinois. Also out of the blue, Barack Obama endorses Alexi Giannoulias for State Treasurer. This was a SHOCK to everyone in Chicago — and Giannoulias would have never become State Treasurer without Obama’s help. In political circles here, it has always been believed that this endorsement was bought years ago with that sweetheart mortgage deal Broadway Bank arranged for Obama to buy his town house.

(6) So, the Tony Rezko sweetheart deal was not the first magic home loan Obama ever received to buy a house he could not afford.

Now we can rest assured that even a force of nature like Fitzgerald will be stopped in his tracks if a criminal like Obama is elected POTUS. This trumps the pitiful attempt by the MSM to smear Palin for any Troopergate ethical flaws.

Obama is an ethical sewer.

UPDATE Here's more on the story as it creeps into the national discourse. Obama's multiple chicanories in Chicago politics may yet break through the ceiling of MSM indifference to anything except smears of McCain & Palin. Wouldn't that be something?

Dodd Should Be Investigated By His Own Committee!

The WSJ rightly suggests that mammoth hypocrite and serial crook Chris Dodd is the biggest fraud inside the Beltway. His daddy was a Senator too and back then when the Senate had SOME ethics and self-esteem [not the collection of bloated aggrandized egomaniacs it is today], his daddy was censured for using campaign funds illegally.

The seed didn't fall far from the tree.

Is Obama So Popular Because He's Not a Black Redneck?

Thomas Sowell's book Black Rednecks and White Liberals is one I want to read. Here is an old WSJ article on why Obama might be so popular---he has no black redneck in his pedigree, only African [and East Coast African, not the Kongo Coast which was the source of many unwilling black slave immigrants]. Here's Sowell:

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.
Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks--not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow. Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style.

But Sowell notes that the difference between the Scotch-Irish and the blacks has widened as the S-Is assimilate into the broader "Northern" culture while blacks continue to confuse authenticity with some sort of ebonics and a criminal subculture based on resistance and resentment of "The Man," e.g., an adult participation in the middlebrow or highbrow culture which Obama is fully at ease with. More Sowell:

While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that--and neither can slavery.

The redneck culture proved to be a major handicap for both whites and blacks who absorbed it. Today, the last remnants of that culture can still be found in the worst of the black ghettos, whether in the North or the South, for the ghettos of the North were settled by blacks from the South. The counterproductive and self-destructive culture of black rednecks in today's ghettos is regarded by many as the only "authentic" black culture--and, for that reason, something not to be tampered with. Their talk, their attitudes, and their behavior are regarded as sacrosanct.

The people who take this view may think of themselves as friends of blacks. But they are the kinds of friends who can do more harm than enemies.

When Obama gave a speech last month at U of Miami, my daughter was amazed to see a couple dozen American blacks stand up in the audience and interrupt Obama, waving placards denying BHO's "authenticity" in colorful patois. These were UM students she thought, who cannot accept the kind of invitation Obama is making to the American people.

I don't support Obama and believe he is terribly compromised by the choices he made to get to the top---Ayers, Wright, Rezko, et al.---but he is not part of the self-destructive black redneck culture that Sowell rightly describes as "a major handicap."

And liberals appear to be content to allow the black rednecks a tiny slice of the American Pie, and really seem to prefer their self-exclusion from full participation in the exercise of their freedoms.

Polls Too Close to Call, Says Zogby

John Zogby used to be called "the most dependable pollster by in-the-tank, over-the-hill libtard journalists like Mark Shields. Now as he utters wisdom while scrawny chests are being thumped on the far-left lunatic fringe because of a 10-point Gallup lead, it is useful to remember that in 2000, Gore had ten points on GWB at the beginning of October. Here's John:

Zogby said the race mirrors the 1980 election, when voters didn’t embrace Ronald Reagan over then-President Jimmy Carter until just days before the election.

“The Sunday before the election the dam burst,” Zogby said of the 1980 tilt. “That’s when voters determined they were comfortable with Reagan.”

Now voters are wrestling with two senators with opposite resumes - Obama, at 47, the unknown, and the established 72-year-old McCain.

Zogby said he’s still hearing from moderates and non-partisan voters - what he calls “the big middle” - who are still shopping for a candidate.

“It still can break one way or the other,” Zogby says.

Of course, if McCain closes the gap and wins a squeaker, the Dems have 10,000 lawyers ready to challenge in every battleground state. The ambulance chasers have nothing to do since their hair-and-makeup pretty boy got outed with Rielle Hunter. But Sarah Palin appears to have given McCain a bump after her great TV performance last Friday, which showed a tired and phony Biden making points, but losing in the authenticity game and just plain good TV presence on Palin's part. She's a real human being, not an inside-the-Beltway confection who's sold and rented his soul/support a thousand times for conflicting causes. Read Camille Paglia, who supports Obama, but likes Palin too. Looks like the undecideds are still up in the air:

The latest poll numbers may reflect the bump that McCain received after his running mate, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin sparred with Obama’s running mate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden during the first and only vice presidential debate last week.

The poll shows that the two White House contenders have no problem attracting support from their own parties.

Obama is winning 84 percent of the Democratic Party support and McCain has 85 percent of the GOP support, but Obama has the edge among sought-after Independent voters.

He leads McCain among independents, 48 percent to 39 percent, according to the poll.

Obama also has support from a slightly higher percent of conservative voters than McCain gets from liberal voters, but the advantage is small, according to the poll.

Right now the economic jitters rule and Obama has a boost from that even though the Dems were more responsible for causing the meltdown. The average voter just thinks, throw the bums out.

But putting both Houses of Congress and the White House in the hands of the same party is always dicey.

In the case of the far-left weirdos running the two Houses now, especially Dingy Harry "The war is already lost" Reid, the damage to the economy and to American education and healthcare could be catastrophic.

Dem Panic About What the NYT and MSM are trying to hide on the Ayers Connection

The WaPo/NYT DNC Talking Points are becoming strident, the NYT going so far as to call any reference to the Ayers/Obama connection "race-baiting."

Of course, Bill Ayers is white, but to Bob Herbert, everything is race-baiting except adoration of the Golden One.

Seriously, the anecdotal evidence that Bernardine Dohrn was Michelle Robinson's "mentor" at Sidley & Austin law firm is strong, but the NYT and Chicago "media/DNC hacks" haven't turned over that rock.
Michelle induced her then boyfriend Barry Hussein-O the next summer to intern under Dohrn and get the full dose of how to quietly overturn society Saul Alinsky style. They were both young Harvard Law students & sho' nuff, the paralegal Dohrn [she had a law degree, but was a convicted felon] introduced the newlyweds to her spouse/lifepartner Ayers who got BHO the chairmanship of the Annenberg Project worth $150 million to subvert school kids by teaching them to be revolting.

I met Ayers and soon-to-be-dead Diana Oughton at an SDS meeting in Ann Arbor. Columbia SDSer Mark Rudd stayed in my apartment and told me "Dare to cheat, dare to win."

I'll bet Obama has that advice in his head constantly.

And McCain smells that rat in Obama's underwear.

I Love Camille Who Loves Sarah Palin

Camille Paglia has an entire Salon series on Obama & McCain, drenched in good common sense. But her best language is for Sarah:

Yes, both Todd and Sarah Palin, whom most people in the U.S. and abroad had never even heard of until six weeks ago, have emerged as powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism. That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism.

Although nothing will sway my vote for Obama, I continue to enjoy Sarah Palin's performance on the national stage. During her vice-presidential debate last week with Joe Biden (whose conspiratorial smiles with moderator Gwen Ifill were outrageous and condescending toward his opponent), I laughed heartily at Palin's digs and slams and marveled at the way she slowly took over the entire event. I was sorry when it ended! But Biden wasn't -- judging by his Gore-like sighs and his slow sinking like a punctured blimp. Of course Biden won on points, but TV (a visual medium) never cares about that.

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin's brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don't we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.

And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don't think sex -- I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry -- including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is "dumb." Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.


Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. But I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant.

Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism. As I said in my last column, Palin has made the biggest step forward in reshaping the persona of female authority since Madonna danced her dominatrix way through the shattered puritan barricades of the feminist establishment. In 1990, in a highly controversial New York Times op-ed that attacked old-guard feminist ideology, I declared that "Madonna is the future of feminism" -- a prophecy that was ridiculed at the time but that turned out to be quite true. Madonna put pro-sex feminism on the international map.

But it is now 18 years later -- the span of an entire generation. The instabilities and diminishments for young women raised in an increasingly shallow media environment have become all too obvious. I had grown up in a vibrant pop culture with glorious women stars of voluptuous sensuality -- above all Elizabeth Taylor, sewn into that silky white slip as the vixen Manhattan call girl of "Butterfield 8." In college, I feasted on foreign films starring sexual sophisticates like Jeanne Moreau, Anouk Aimée and Catherine Deneuve. Sex today, however, has become brittle and superficial. Except for the occasional diverting flash of Lindsay Lohan's borrowed bosom, I see nothing whatever that is worth a second glance. Pro-sex feminism has worked itself out and, like all movements, has degenerated into clichés. And even Madonna, with her skeletal megalomania, looks like a refugee from a horror movie.

The next phase of feminism must circle back and reappropriate the ancient persona of the mother -- without losing career ambition or power of assertion. Betty Friedan, who had first attacked the cult of postwar domesticity, had long warned second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem about the damaging exclusion of homemakers from their value system. The animus of liberal feminists toward religion must also end (I am speaking as an atheist). Feminism must reexamine all of its assumptions, including its death grip on abortion, if it wishes to survive.

The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin's bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition -- without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She's no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she's pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite -- which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey's witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin's cadences and charm, she can't capture the energy, which is a force of nature.

Bravissima!!!

Read her four pages of beautiful language deconstructing both the vapid dorkwads running our country and the liberal elites, who want to race Neville Chamberlain to retire the Guinness Cup for quivering craven cowardice in the face of socialists and socialist wannabes like Chavez, Putin, and the violent reactionaries in Iran. Thank God there's no Hitler yet, but Putin is just a couple of years from his own Enabling Act.