One Little Victory

Some light reading for Sunday morning, and more to come later.

- Another Momo Recipient

Arnold Conrad, a former pastor at Grace Evangelical Free Church in Davenport, Iowa, blathered on about God needing to save his own reputation by making sure Obama doesn’t win the election, during the invocation for a McCain rally yesterday. Putting aside the lack of logic in Conrad’s comments, has he not gotten the news that Obama is a Christian? Yet another shining example of why politics and religion shouldn’t be mixed in our nation.

- Palin booed at Flyers’ game

Maybe Philly fans do have class after all. The same city that once booed Santa Claus got it right yesterday, piling on ninety seconds of booing during Palin’s visit to drop the first puck at the Flyers’ season opener. You know, if Philly hockey fans are torching America’s best known hockey mom, I am feeling pretty good about carrying Pennsylvania.

- This would be a Momo…

… but I generally don’t give anonymous Momos. Bit this is also disgusting. A man went to a Palin rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania monkey with a toy monkey with an Obama sticker wrapped around it. Clearly this racist son of a bitch was going to hold it up and cheer during Palin’s speech. But watch what happens when the cameras catch him… thanks to ANewDawn08 at You Tube, who makes the video even more entertaining with some astute observations. Well done.

UPDATE: Same asshole, a few minutes before the first video was shot…

What a coward. People like this really should be locked away… he is a disgusting example of the worst of humanity. This is someone who, in 1930s’ Germany, would have been one of the angry mob beating and killing Jews. I hope the McCain crowd is proud to have him in their camp.

- Leaving a sinking ship

Conservative editor of D Magazine Wick Allison has penned an editorial, A Conservative for Obama, in which he bashes what modern ‘conservatism’ has become, and he writes:

…Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

Well said, and funny how the racists and kool-aid drinkers (often one in the same) fail to mention the increasing departure of conservatives to support Barack Obama.

Taking the lead from Allison, Christopher Buckley, arguably one of the icons of conservatism, has also made the leap to Obama. In his endorsement, he wrote:

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Full story here…

- Bush: Lots to do

President Bush is actually going to have to earn his paycheck in his last 100 days in office, or at least so he ways. I don’t think it will be him working hard so much as it will be the paper shredders.

Bush: ‘Lot of work to do’ before leaving office

WASHINGTON (AP) — So how will it end?

President Bush is down to his final 100 days in office as of Sunday. Don’t expect a quiet fade into the Texas night.

The bleakest economic downturn in decades has changed the dynamic drastically, keeping Bush and his financial team in activist mode to the end.

While the powerful heads of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve keep making radical moves, no one elected them. Bush is the one charged with reassuring the nation that an abysmal economic period will give way to better days, even if he is long gone from Washington by the time that happens.

The president will keep speaking about the economy, calling world leaders about it, meeting with business owners, perhaps attending an overseas summit. His final act will be overseeing the $700 billion buyout of devalued assets from banks, in hopes that credit will start flowing to an anxious, weary country.

“It looks like I’m going to have a lot of work to do between today and when the new president takes office,” Bush said this past week.

Full story here…