The indoctrination of our kids

In about 1937 or so Hitler spoke to my mother's elementary school. (My mother is a German native) She was chosen to present him with a bunch of flowers and he patted her on the head. She was thrilled.

In his speech he encouraged the kids to be good students and good Germans. In fact he equated the two, he told them that the way for them to be Good Germans was to be good students and to mind their parents. That was about it.

I hope we don't hear anything like that from Obama.

Hotheads sitting around drinking beer

It's been my experience that having a couple of proven hotheads sitting around drinking beer does not tend to result in things calming down.

From the Daily News

"I am pleased that [Obama] is eager to use my experience as a teaching moment," the esteemed Harvard professor wrote on the Web site TheRoot.com late Friday.

"And if meeting Sgt. Crowley for a beer with the President will further that end, then I would be happy to oblige," he wrote.

Obama phoned both men on Friday to discuss the much debated events of July 16 and to invite them to the White House for a cold one. Crowley has not yet made a public RSVP, but is said to be on board.

Read more:

Hillary as Secretary of State

During the democratic primary there were two different ways to select delegates. Straightforward voting and selection by caucus.

Hillary was able to convince a lot of people that she was a marginally better choice than Obama and so she tended to win the states with simple votes.

But when it came to attracting the committed to her side, getting the votes of those for whom it really mattered rather than votes of those with a mild preference, Hillary fell on her face. She couldn't do it.

The job of Secretary of State isn't a job of counting up votes of people with mild preferences. It's about getting countries with a serious stake in things to come over to your side.

Hillary proved to be incompetent at that. There's no way she'd be a competent Secretary of State.

What kind of terrorist has a living room?

h/t Althouse

Obama

Obama is a weasel and a coward. New politics my ass.

Who you gonna call?

"It's 3 a.m. and your children are safely asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?"

I want the guy who's been up doing cocaine all night because he'll be awake and alert at 3 am. We don't want some woman waking up at 3 am and wondering where her husband is to answer that phone.

Update: Althouse thinks the ad's effective.

The Spoiler Candidate

Nader has decided to waste his time running for President again.

Some are calling him a spoiler candidate, one who won't accomplish anything but draining enough votes from the democratic candidate to tilt the outcome towards electing McMcain.

But with him in the race I think the spoiler candidate is Hillary.

Before he joined the race she had some chance of winning the election. Not much, but some. If she can beat Obama then she might be able to beat McCain. It's not a sure thing that she could, but she'd have a shot.

Not with Nader in the race. With Nader an option there's no chance in hell she could beat McCain in the general election.

If she manages to win the nomination she will not get at least some of the votes that would have gone to Obama. That's a sure thing. That's whether Nader is in the race or not. But enough democrats will refuse to vote for a republican that she might get enough of the Obama votes to carry the election. But if they can vote for Nader then it's very likely that enough of them would rather vote for him and let McCain win than they would see Hillary in the White House.

That's the way I feel about it. Richardson or Edwards were candidates I could support. Obama is one I could vote for. McCain is one that I don't think I could vote for, but I think he'd make a better President in some ways than Hillary.

The problem with the Hillary McCain matchup is that they're both evil, just in different ways. You can't really say one is the lessor evil. So, in that case, to hell with it, just vote for Nader as a protest vote. In an Obama McCain matchup you have Obama as both a protest vote and a vote for a guy who might actually make a good President.

Hillary should give it up. For the good of the country.

Obama and the 2nd Amendment

Obama thinks that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to own guns. Charlton Heston should be proud.

He blew his nose

Althouse writes about Obama blowing his nose and actually getting applause from the crowd and newspaper articles about it (and blog posts too, I guess).

I don't really have anything to say about it other than I got praise for blowing my nose once.

It was when I was a kid, probably about 8 or so. I think 8 is right, I think I was in the third grade. I was a narrator for the Christmas pageant at our family's church. I stood up in the pulpit giving a memorized script as other kids acted out virgin child birth in the background. They had a little wooden step ladder for me to stand on so my head would poke out above the pulpit.

I had a cold and runny nose. Before I went up to the pulpit my mother game me a fresh handkerchief. It had little roses on the corners. A woman's handkerchief. Very feminine. About half way through the presentation I needed to blow my nose. I couldn't pull out this woman's handkerchief in front of this crowd of people. I was a boy, not just a boy but a Texas boy. That clearly just wasn't going to work. But snot rolling down to my upper lip wasn't going to work either.

So I hit on the solution. During the birth contractions of play I figured no one would be watching me and I stepped down so that I was hidden by the pulpit and used my momma's handkerchief to blow my nose. I didn't realize how sensitive the mic was though.

Anyway, my grandmother had been in the crowd. This was a big deal since our church was Lutheran and my grandmother was a West Texas Methodist. For her to go to a Liberal Lutheran church was a pretty big deal.

After the event my grandmother told me how proud she was of me for being so grown up and going out of my way to hide the snot from the crowd by stepping out of sight when I blew my nose.

Until she said that it hadn't occured to me that it might be rude to blow my nose publically, I was just hiding the shame of having a woman's handkerchief.

Note: The spell check is broken on my blogspot and I wasn't sure about the spelling of handkerchief. I thought I knew how to spell it, but I wasn't sure about the ie or ei in chief. I never can get that stuff right. So I put the word in my word processor to check it and discovered that I not only didn't know how to spell the word, I guess I can't pronounce it either. I had thought it was hankerchief.

Clinton, Obama, and 60 minutes

I didn't watch 60 minutes this past Sunday but apparantly they had seperate interviews of Clinton and Obama. And apparantly 60 minutes has managed to turn itself into a boring softball game.

No difference between Hillary and Obama

I was in the car this afternoon, listening to Hannity.

He was talking about the Dems and kept saying that there's not a licks worth of difference between Clinton and Obama.

I guess to him there really isn't. They're democrats, they all look alike to Hannity.

But but when you have differences on topics like Iraq and the drug war and sexual harrassment of women in the workforce, I think most actual people can tell them apart.

Clinton and Obama

I think a Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton ticket is a really, really bad idea.

I just think Hillary would be a very poor executive in either slot.

Inflation and purchasing power

Double Blind has a good post about inflation and it's relationship to purchasing power. It's written by a Canadian, so the references to dollars are about Canadian dollars.

But it's a topic American's need to be paying attention to. The American dollar is losing purchasing power at a very dangerous rate. You can thank government policies about lower taxes and higher spending for that and I don't see any indication that Clinton or McCain will do anything to change that direction in a meaningful way. Maybe Obama will save us. Maybe he won't.

Waterboarding and the race for President

This is why you should realize that they're pretty much all worthless. It appears that none of the candidates where in this meeting, but the leading contenders are part of the culture that the ones in this meeting come from.

This country does not need another religious and anti-science nutcase running the whitehouse, but Huckabee at least has some sense of moral scruples. Something Hillary and Obama and Romney and Rudy simply don't have. We don't need any of those worthless people in power.

I'm still a fan of Richardson or Paul but somebody like Huckabee or Edwards might be worth considering, depending on how things play out. None of those four leading contenders mentioned above are worth any consideration at all.

The democrats two lead weasels

Ann Althouse is offended by Hilliary and Obama having voting against the unrestricted Iraq funding bill.

I'm offended by the way they behaved like weasels in not taking a public position until all the other votes were counted.

Ann doesn't appear to care about the character of our candidates, just about whether they vote they way she thinks they could. I think character matters a lot and both these candidates lack character.