Looks Uncomfortable

Malkin on Obama, ACORN and Community Organizin'

It's good. Excerpt:

Let me clarify something. Nobody is mocking community organizers in church basements and community centers across the country working to improve their neighbors' lives. What deserves ridicule is the notion that Obama's brief stint as a South Side rabble-rouser for tax-subsidized, partisan nonprofits qualifies as executive experience you can believe in.

What deserves derision is "community organizing" that relies on a community of homeless people and ex-cons to organize for the purpose of registering dead people to vote, shaking down corporations and using the race card as a bludgeon.

As I've reported previously, Obama's community organizing days involved training grievance-mongers from the far-left ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The ACORN mob is infamous for its bully tactics (which they dub "direct actions"); Obama supporters have recounted his role in organizing an ambush on a government planning meeting about a landfill project opposed by Chicago's minority lobbies.

Genius Mashup: Linus sings the Police

This is pretty well done. I love the "Eee-oh-oh" parts at the end. Snoopy does a great Andy Summers.

Poll: McCain & Obama Tied

From CBS.

(CBS) The presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain is now even at 42 percent, according to a new CBS News poll conducted Monday-Wednesday of this week. Twelve percent are undecided according to the poll, and one percent said they wouldn't vote.

Uh-oh... Anyone's community need to be organized?

"Trivialize her at your own peril."

Christopher Orr at the TNR blog.

Sarah Palin is a living reminder that the ultimate source of political power in this country is not the Kennedy School or the Davos Summit or an Ariana Huffington salon; even now, power emanates from the electorate itself. More precisely, power in 2008 emanates from the working class electorates of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Sooner or later, the Obama camp will realize that the beauty pageant queen is an enormously talented populist in a year that is ripe for populism. For their own sake, it had better be sooner.

The Snob defines Bourgeois Liberalism

Here's a must read tidbit in the LOL department from our old friend, the Snob. Cross file in the categories of promoting awareness and being hopelessly unclear.

Sarah Palin: Flagship of the New Feminism?

When I heard Sarah Palin was a member of Feminists for Life obviously I thought first of Pope John Paul II. This is because the first time I encountered the elucidation of a "new feminism", which incorporated respect for all life, born and unborn, it was while reading his encyclical The Gospel of Life. The pertinent excerpt is in part 99.

99. In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to promote a "new feminism" which rejects the temptation of imitating models of "male domination", in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.

Rough words here for the "old feminism"; the Holy Father is basically saying "You became as bad as the boys whose behavior you rightly decried, girls." Then he turns to the positive and begins to expound upon the "true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society" by quoting earlier remarks from Vatican II and his Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem:

You are called to bear witness to the meaning of genuine love, of that gift of self and of that acceptance of others which are present in a special way in the relationship of husband and wife, but which ought also to be at the heart of every other interpersonal relationship. The experience of motherhood makes you acutely aware of the other person and, at the same time, confers on you a particular task: "Motherhood involves a special communion with the mystery of life, as it develops in the woman's womb ... This unique contact with the new human being developing within her gives rise to an attitude towards human beings not only towards her own child, but every human being, which profoundly marks the woman's personality". A mother welcomes and carries in herself another human being, enabling it to grow inside her, giving it room, respecting it in its otherness. Women first learn and then teach others that human relations are authentic if they are open to accepting the other person: a person who is recognized and loved because of the dignity which comes from being a person and not from other considerations, such as usefulness, strength, intelligence, beauty or health. This is the fundamental contribution which the Church and humanity expect from women. And it is the indispensable prerequisite for an authentic cultural change.

Emphasis mine. Because I couldn't help thinking of widely-reported life affirming remarks regarding her little boy, Trig, who was born with Down's Syndrome:

Palin knew there were complications while she was pregnant but never considered an abortion. When he was born, she said, "I'm looking at him right now and I see perfection. Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking: in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?" Undaunted, she held a meeting as governor three days after giving birth. "I just put down the BlackBerrys and pick up the breast pump," she said of her life as a working mother.

It would seem to me that Sarah Palin is someone who is intimately acquainted with the qualities of usefulness, strength, intelligence, beauty and health in her own person, and yet that is not what she ultimately values the most. She loves her son for the dignity of his own otherness, his personhood. From her simple words, we see the attitude of accepting, unconditional love toward another person which the Holy Father says is the "profound mark of the woman's personality."

"This is the fundamental contribution which the Church and humanity expect from women. And it is the indispensable prerequisite for an authentic cultural change."

Does this not make her a more than adequate spokesperson for this New Feminism, if not a veritable embodiment?

So, unlike New Coke and "the New Math", I have to say I like the New Feminism better than the old stuff. And just in the interest of full disclosure, I do not own any stock in brassiere companies.

(What's the "V" for anyway, Betty?)

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha

Here's a laughable comment on Sarah Palin from one of the "Lewnies" on the far-right:

Writes Rick Banks: "Wouldn't joining McCain mean that this woman, despite any good she has done, has decided to put that aside to be on this man's ticket?" Yes. She has sworn a blood oath to the neocons, Wall Street, and the military industrial-complex, to be Vice Sauron in Mordor.

Fortunately for the United States, in the modern political arena these folk are taken about as seriously as people who dress up like Hobbits.

Fact-challenged Joe Biden

If I hear the word "hard-scrabble" again in reference to Joe Biden I'm going to... well, laugh probably. Read this Steve Chapman piece, excerpts follow:

The facts are there for anyone who wants to look at them. When Joe Biden Sr. died in 2002, his obituary in the News-Journal of Wilmington reported that when he married in 1941, "he was working as a sales representative for Amoco Oil Co. in Harrisburg."

It went on, "Biden also was an executive in a Boston-based company that supplied waterproof sealant for U.S. merchant marine ships built during World War II. After the war, he co-owned an airport and crop-dusting service on Long Island." Upon moving his family to Delaware, the News-Journal said, Biden "worked in the state first as a sales manager for auto dealerships and later in real-estate condominium sales."

Executive, co-owner and manager? Those titles identify the jobholder as solidly middle class, if not better. They fall in the category of white-collar occupations, not blue-collar.

And it gets better....

Biden notes that he himself could have gone to the best public high school in Delaware. Instead, he enrolled at Archmere Academy, a Catholic prep school that made him think he had "died and gone to Yale." He took a summer job to help pay the steep tuition, which today amounts to $18,450 a year.

OK, so he wasn't rich, but hardly underprivileged in the normal use of the term. So... why so serious, Joe, about the insistence on mythical blue-collar roots?

So where did he get his working-class reputation? Partly it comes from Biden's streetwise demeanor and his preoccupation with the fact that his family wasn't as well-off as some of the people he knew -- which seems to have given him a permanent chip on his shoulder.

Oh, well that more than explains it. Sounds like Joe's ready for a green-collar job, as in green with envy. As I've quoted Mr. Morrisey in regards to that verdantly-colored fault previously, "we hate it when our friends become successful."