The Sundries Shack

All in all, Hillary Clinton’s DNC speech last night was pretty yawn-inspiring stuff, with a couple or three things that made me scratch my head and wonder what planet she called home.

The very first thing that caught my attention is how she completely dissed her husband at the very beginning of the speech. When you mention how you’re a proud Mom and a proud Democrat and a proud member of the Rotary Club and a proud member of the Senate Fantasy Football league, if you don’t say that you’re a proud wife (especially when your husband is sitting in a seat of honor), it’s going to be noticed.

The second thing I noticed was the Senator’s interesting idea about how our economy works.

We need a president who understands that we can’t solve the problems of global warming by giving windfall profits to the oil companies while ignoring opportunities to invest in the new technologies that will build a green economy.

I did notice that after she said that, she pushed the mask back up on her face because she knows that there’s only so much Socialist craziness that America can accept. I didn’t expect much in the way of free market ideals from a person who has spent almost all of her working life drawing a government paycheck and looks on people in private industry as either victims to be rescued from their misery or walking bags of money for her campaign. Still, I was disappointed because I also didn’t expect something quite that silly from her.

The last thing I noticed was that, according to the Senator, men barely had a thing to do with the suffrage movement.

I’m a United States Senator because in 1848 a group of courageous women and a few brave men gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, many traveling for days and nights, to participate in the first convention on women’s rights in our history.

And so dawned a struggle for the right to vote that would last 72 years, handed down by mother to daughter to granddaughter — and a few sons and grandsons along the way.

These women and men looked into their daughters’ eyes, imagined a fairer and freer world, and found the strength to fight. To rally and picket. To endure ridicule and harassment. To brave violence and jail.

And after so many decades — 88 years ago on this very day — the 19th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote would be forever enshrined in our Constitution.

You like that little bit of rhetorical magic? It was just “a few” men involved in passing the 19th Amendment. I understand the whole “grrrl power” theme of her speech and all that, but it still rankled that many men who worked in their state and local governments to pass suffrage laws well before the 19th Amendment was passed were reduced to playing the roles of the Professor and Mary Ann in her speech. She also glided very neatly over the fact that unless 2/3 of the men in Congress and the majority of the men in 2/3 of the states didn’t vote for the 19th Amendment, it would not have passed. A simple “thank you” would not have been out of place and would have been well-received, I think.

Aside from those three points, her speech was pretty bland and safe. She could just as easily have given it in 2004, substituting “John Kerry” for “Barack Obama” and it wouldn’t have needed any substantive changes. I can’t help but think that, no matter what happens in November, we’ve seen the last of Hillary Clinton as a national candidate. I”m a bit sad that she couldn’t have mustered a better speech to go out on.

MS-NBC has easily the most partisan and openly left-leaning group of journalists of any news network. The powers that be at NBC made that decision on purpose, to combat what they see as a similar right-wing bias among Fox journalists.

The only problem with that is eventually those considerable egos were going to start to conflict with each other. What the network execs at NBC forgot to take into account is that, on the left, politics is intensely personal. It’s not that way on the right, which is why the more conservative pundits on Fox can share the same stage without getting into slapfights.

I’m not shocked that the Obama-loving Olbermann and Matthews aren’t getting along with the more skeptical Scarborough and the other journalists like Brokaw and Mike Murphy who at least make an attempt to be objective in their reporting. David Shuster is just a down-the-line leftist who carries the same ill-informed scorn for anyone not parroting the party line, which doesn’t put him on any particular side but does put him at odds with the barely-centrist Joe Scarborough.

Let’s also not forget that the network still hasn’t decided to permanently give anyone the spot as host of Meet the Press, which is by far the top perch at NBC. That’s a plum that the egotists who currently host shows on MS-NBC just can’t resist trying to get, preferably by shanking the competition in the kidney on the air.

I’m sure all this infighting during the DNC alarms some progressive somewhere. For the rest of us, it’s just a lot of fun to watch - like watching the big pie fight at the end of am episode of The Three Stooges.

I actually stayed up last night and watched Hillary Clinton’s DNC speech. I didn’t blog it because I wanted to pay attention to what I was seeing as well as what I was hearing. There was a lot there to see, too.

The first thing I noticed was that, on television, the Hillary Clinton signs way outnumbered the Barack Obama signs. Thee weren’t just the basic white “Hillary” signs. There were quite a few “Hillary for President” signs being waved in that crowd last night.

The second thing was something I’ve not seen anyone else mention today and I thought it was touching. As Hillary was on stage receiving the thunderous applause of the audience, the Fox news cameras cut to Bill, who was simply beaming. In the few seconds the camera was on him, he mouthed the words “I love you”, then he did it again three more times in quick succession. Given eveything the cameras could have shown while she was on stage, I don’t think there was any way he could know that the camera would be on him just then.

The third thing, which actually happened first, but I think deserves some more attention, was the introduction video played before Hillary took the stage. I’m not sure who approved it, but whoever it was, they didn’t do Barack Obama any favors. It was the sort of video you play for a nominee, not someone headlining the second night of a convention. Barack Obama wasn’t mentioned a single time in the whole thing. In fact, his image flashed in the video a couple times toward the end in a sort of “what the hell was that?” sort of way. The one image I recall was of Obama giving a speech, hand raised to Heaven. The image was completely incongruous to what was being said at the time and it almost seemed to me that the videographers were walking the find edge of subliminal advertising. I have to imagine that they needed to shove Obama into the video somewhere since he is the actual nominee, but that there wasn’t any good place to do so they just sort of stuck him in at the end to remind everyone of his existence. It was a great video for Clinton but a stunningly bad one for Barack Obama.

That kind of sums up the whole night, from what I saw.

About ten years ago, I saw a movie called The Immortals. Though the movie, packed to the gills with B-list talent, wasn’t very good, there was once scene that was brilliant. The movie follows a group of criminals who have been hired to rob a crime boss (played by Curtis). At one point, the five criminals led by Eric Roberts end up in a kitchen confronted by the mobster and his four heavies. They all draw their guns and by the time the scene reaches its climax, everyone in the room has a gun aimed at them and is aiming a gun at someone else. You can get a taste of the scene in the trailer (the scene I remember is at about 1:30)

It ends, of course, when a hapless waiter walks in and drops his tray in surprise. The noise startles one of the gun-wielders, who pulls the trigger and the whole scene devolves in to a slow-motion shootout where everyone is either killed or injured.

The Democratic National Convention is starting to look like that scene in the kitchen with Hillary Clinton and her people on one side and the Obamessiah’s disciples on the other. Bill Clinton is telling Democrats that maybe they wouldn’t be best off with Obama as President. Hillary’s big speech tonight may not name Obama at all. Obama is bossing her around and the rabble in the streets is very restless.

Meanwhile, John McCain and his supporters are firing out a blizzard of television ads reminding people what an assortment of scumbags Barack Obama has befriended over the years to climb a few more rungs on his way to ultimate political power.

Now all we need is one hapless person to stumble in and make a loud noise. The political carnage will be beautiful. So who is going to be the one to do it?

Are the labor unions in the pocket of the Democratic Party? Well, you tell me. Union bosses are spreading the word that their members are a bunch of racists whose hatred for black people has to be “overcome”.

Nice job, guys. That ought to help your flagging membership and increasing irrelevance.

Remember the days when labor unions were simply a bunch of employees who organized to strengthen their negotiating power with employers?

Those were the days. Nowadays, labor unions are strictly political entities that suck the lifeblood from companies (and hurt workers in the process - ask an auto worker how much it costs to make a car in the US thanks to union-demanded concessions), to enrich the bigwigs inside the union, and to fill the coffers of Democratic politicians. That’s why union membership has been falling like a pregnant pole vaulter in the past few years.

When it comes to stories about Russia’s invasion of Georgia (such as this one which tells how Russia is trying to make formal what it’s been doing for a long time), reporters make one fundamental mistake that colors their coverage wrongly. I’ve made the same mistake in some conversations I’ve had about Georgia. The mistake we make is in saying that Georgia started the conflict and was trying to take back South Ossetia. Here’s how the msitake is often put:

Georgia and Russia fought a brief war over the breakaway region of South Ossetia earlier this month after Georgia sent in troops to try to retake the province by force. Russia responded with a massive counter-attack by land, sea and air.

As it happens, that is not correct. Michael Totten got the chance to speak to two of the best-informed men on the entire geopolitical situation in that area and they gave him an “idiot’s guide” to the history of the region since 1991. The truth is that the Russian invasion of Georgia has been cooking for a lot longer than we think and that the Russian government has been lying through its teeth the whole time. To be sure, the Georgian government has made its share of mistakes, but those were msitakes of diplomacy and not deliberate belligerence and conquest. An excerpt can not do his article justice, but this paragraph captures most of what you’ll find therein.

Virtually everyone is wrong. Georgia didn’t start it on August 7, nor on any other date. The South Ossetian militia started it on August 6 when its fighters fired on Georgian peacekeepers and Georgian villages with weapons banned by the agreement hammered out between the two sides in 1994. At the same time, the Russian military sent its invasion force bearing down on Georgia from the north side of the Caucasus Mountains on the Russian side of the border through the Roki tunnel and into Georgia. This happened before Saakashvili sent additional troops to South Ossetia and allegedly started the war.

Please read the whole thing. It’s important when Russia makes its next move on another of our allies to remember what it did in Georgia. We need to have our facts straight so that when Putin’s puppets parrot the same lies as they have in the past three weeks, we can recognize them for what they are and act appropriately.

It rarely takes long for a threatened progressive to go to the old fascism well. It’s almost axiomatic that if you speak out strongly against someone on the left, they won’t respond with substance but with threats and intimidation.

That’s how Barack Obama has reacted to an ad running now in a couple states that uses Obama’s own words and deeds to remind folks just how close he’s been to terrorist Bill Ayers. His campaign has already put out one ad that was supposed to counter the whole Ayers mess except that it was so thin and weak that it ended up raising more question than it answered. Tom Maguire notes at length, saying “I repudiated his crimes” isn’t sufficient given just how closely the two have been throughout Obama’s political career.

So he’s upped the ante by having his campaign threaten television stations in the area of the ad buy with potential FCC investigations and loud moonbat boycotts. His campaign is also “demanding” a criminal investigation of everyone involved with the group responsible for the ad, including any “anonymous donors”.

It’s a shame that he can’t do any better than use the might of the Federal Government against a group of private citizens exercising their Constitutional right to free political speech. I would have thought that a candidate of hope and change would be able to brush aside such charges with a good explanation why he spent so much time working with a man who truly despises our country and has tried to destroy it.

But then I remember he’s a progressive. They don’t do reasonable discourse. They do bullying and strongarm tactics using the very government they want to lead so badly that they don’t care who they trample to get there.

UPDATE: The threatened group responds. It’s a pretty good response, too.

The scenes outside the Democratic national Convention yesterday were pretty exciting at times. A bunch of nostalgic progressives rioted, but couldn’t apparently get the whole riot thing down quite right.

The bigger excitement on the street happened when Alex Jones decided to follow Michelle Malkin around and threaten her life. You might remember Alex Jones from his inane 9/11 Truther theories or from when one of his brain-dead lackeys was locked up for trying (but failing miserably) to beat up a girl in a wheelchair. Well, Jones continued his movement’s tradition of threatening people smaller and with up to 16 pounds more working brain than he has. Luckily, Michelle had some men around her who were capable of warding off the death threats.

Word is they simply pointed into the distance and said, wonderingly, “Why is that black helicopter coming our way?” then watched the morons stampede to the nearest grocery store for tin foil.

Today is Day Two. I’ve no doubt the foolishness will continue.

The Democratic National Convention opens up tonight and I’m expecting a humongous dog and pony show interspersed with scenes of Moonbattery the likes of which God has not seen as well as perhaps a minor miracle or two as the Spirit of Obama moves throughout the throng.

However, there are dissidents afoot and they intend, as Captain Mal Reynolds once said, to misbehave no matter how much Hillary Clinton orders them back into line.

I abjure you to pay no attention to the MSM, who is already in the bag for the Democrats and whose coverage will be as boring as watching one of those painting shows on PBS with the volume turned down. Instead, keep your bookmarks hot and pointed at Robert McCain’s coverage for Pajamas Media and Michelle Malkin’s blog. Both are in Denver and both will cover not just the big events, but the stuff that the DNC doesn’t want you to see.

Robert has already filed his first report from a GLBT meeting today and Michelle has obtained a secret first draft of Michelle Obama’s speech tonight. Robert’s also doubled up the coverage with a few photographs of the good, bad, and downright stupid outside the convention center today.

Oh yarf.

BEIJING (Reuters) - The Beijing Olympics ended with a blaze of deafening fireworks on Sunday, bringing down the curtain on a Games that dazzled the world with sporting brilliance and showcased the might of modern day China.

It looks like China got everything it wanted out of the Olympic Games: a clean bill of health from the media, the fawning adoration of IOC bureaucrats, and a green light to starve, imprison, steal property from, and really torture its citizens at will without having to worry about any meaningful protest from any other nation. Plus it managed to pick up some additional loyalty from the Chinese who live in the cities, even those who have had their houses and lands stolen from them to build the lavish venues used in the past two weeks.

Did China show us its might? You bet it did, and we in the free world were too mesmerised by the pageantry to notice much of anything else.

I wonder, though, if anyone oohing and aahing over the fireworks in Beijing gave thought to the thousands of Chinese peasants who will die because their government took their water away so it could produce the fake beauty of the Olympic compound.

Maybe we’ll see that story show up in an NBC news report, do you think? I’m sure the network will get right on that as soon as it gets up off its knees and straightens up its clothing.

We voters ought to be at least a little bit ashamed that we’ve let a nincompoop like Nancy Pelosi get her hands on our national energy policy. It’s not enough that we let someone who believes she’s on a mission to “save the planet” get her delusional mitts on the levers of political power. That would be bad enough, considering that we’ve seen what happens when an old-school progressive starts getting Messianic aspirations.

No, we should be ashamed because our Speaker of the House thinks that natural gas is a pefectly cromulent alternative to fossil fuels. She dropped that little nugget a couple times yesterday on Meet the Press while defending the fact that she stands to profit quite handsomely from the policies she’s pushing.

Keep on reading…

There isn’t much that makes me laugh as hard as a geek joke. Unless it’s a geek joke involving NASA and the metric system.

That’s too funny, right there.

Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania, and a man who is now as ardent a Barack Obama supporter as he was a Hillary Clinton supporter decided to give assorted MSM luminaries the “what-fer” during a panel discussion.

The luminaries did not like it. Judy Woodruff shut him down when he dared to say that Chris Matthews tossed his objectivity out the window like an empty Doritos bag for Barack Obama and the audience, most of whom is a Who’s Who of media bias clapped like a room full of trained chimps.

Good for Rendell. Someone of stature in the Democratic Party has to tell the MSM that they’re embarrassing themselves this election cycle. The way they’ve been prostrating themselves at the feet of the Obamessiah has been shameful and I’m glad that Rendell called him on it. I’m also glad that he was treated as rudely as we conservatives have been treated by that pack of elitist twits. I mean, come on. Arianna Huffington? Gwen Ifill? Al Hunt? If there’s a molecule of objectivity among those three, it’s dying of loneliness. It’s good that he got a taste of what we’ve been getting for twenty years.

Rendell should be proud of their scorn. If they’re cheering against him, he’s doing something right.

I must admit, I’m not at all sure what to do with this story:

If you asked a random sample of progressive Democrats and liberal bloggers to describe the current state of political media, from CNN to The New York Times, there’s one word that’s unlikely to come up: “liberal.”

For those on the left, the more operative words these days are “mainstream,” “establishment,” or “traditional.” And if one is feeling particularly aggrieved, the description of choice is increasingly — and surprisingly — “conservative.”

The “left” to which Calderone refers is the crew most affectionately known as “the nutroots”, that Mos Eiseley Cantina of bloggers and Democratis insiders who have hitched their wagons to Barack Obama. These days, they’re finding out that Obama’s just another Chicago politician and it hurts.

So they’re taking their ire out on the MSM who dares to report such salacious stuff as what Obama really says or the history of the people he has counted as close friends. To be sure, there has been a bit of anti-Obama backlash in the past month, but let’s face it folks, Barack Obama has said and done some brick-stupid things lately and not reporting them would have been…

…well it would have been even beyond a hopelessly left-slanted media.

If the nutroots have any complaint, it is that coverage of Barack Obama lately has been reality-based, which is to say that it’s antithetical to their own warped view of the world where they are the brave heroes of their own internal fiction novels. However, I do find myself agreeing with Markos Moulitsas when he labels news coverage of this election “utterly vapid, devoid of context, frequently wrong, and wedded to narratives that defy all logic and reality”. I’m sure that Vicki Iseman would agree.

Here’s Glenn Reynolds, on this Democratic National Convention drinking game, “Sounds like fun, but I’ve only got one liver. And I’m still using it.”

My, my the nutroots are thin-skinned today. I wonder if it has anything to do with their Chosen One picking a lobbyist-cuddling, gaffe-belching, Iraq War-supporting, Washington insider as a running mate?

Their object of ire today is the AP’s Ron Fournier, who dared to venture into the role of news analyst today to call Obama’s choice of Biden pedestrian. Here’s how the Politico is reporting the leftist outrage:

Today, Fournier inflamed the Netroots yet again, with his (Drudge-worthy) analysis: “Biden pick shows lack of confidence.”:
…
Steven Benen, who just moved to the Washington Monthly this week, wrote that Fournier’s “objectivity covering the presidential race continues to look shaky.” Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas dubbed him “McCain’s mole at the Associated Press,” a sentiment echoed by MyDD’s Jonathan Singer, who wrote that he’s “effectively serving as a McCain surrogate in talking about the Biden choice.”

I don’t quite get the level of outrage here. Fournier wasn’t writing a news story. His article is headlined, “Analysis: Biden pick shows lack of confidence.” It’s silly of someone like Benen, who clearly knows better, to expect down-the-middle objectivity in a piece that says right up front that it’s an analysis piece. When you read how Fournier opened his analysis, it’s tough to reasonably disagree with him. Fournier says, “The candidate of change went with the status quo.”

Keep on reading…

Oh man, here comes the MSM’s Biden Rehabilitation project.

This morning New York Times reporter John Harwood showed up on Obama-NBC to explain why Biden’s “clean” comment about Obama for which we had to apologize profusely doesn’t really matter at all.

He is not somebody who is infused with political correctness, the verbal equivalent of putting his pinky up when he opens his mouth. So this is what, the way ordinary voters are as well. They’re not always worried about sort of calibrating every single word by “ooh, is this racially insensitive?” That’s something that Joe Biden brings as an asset to the ticket. The gaffes actually show one of his strengths.

Keep on reading…

After taking heat for ramping up its enforcements efforts against illegal immigrants and the company who hire the lawbreakers, ICE decided to roll out a new kinder and gentler program earlier this month. The agency called it “Scheduled Departure” and aimed it at the 457,000 illegal immigrants who have already been ordered to leave the country but who have not.

Here’s how the program was supposed to work. If you were one of those continuing lawbreakers, you had 90 days to turn yourself back into ICE. You’d then get to choose when you returned to your home country and could work out the details with any family you still had here. Instaed of getting arrested and spending the time before your deportation in prison, you could go back home on your own terms. Seems fair enough to me.

Apaprently it didn’t seem quite fair enough to 456,992 illegal immigrants because in the three weeks the program existed, only eight people took advantage of it.

Scheduled Departure was a good attempt by ICE to demonstrate that they aren’t the heartless family-destroying bastards that the open borders/reconquista folks make them out to be. Ihe simple fact of it is that people who are in the US illegally are lawbreakers and thieves. ICE gave them a chance to show some goodwill and leave without penalty. They chose to spurn the offer. I say that ICE step up their enforcement even more than they already have. After all, we know that enforcement works.

Would that John McCain got that message.

Joe Biden??

Seriously. This has to be a joke. After a week of teasing the press into a state of turgidity not seen outside some place with a name like “The Champagne Room”, Barack Obama picked notorious blowhard and Peter Principle posterboy Joe Biden as his running mate. The candidate of hope and change picked a guy who has been in the Senate since 1973 (I guess Ted Kennedy’s illness ruled him out, huh?). Democrats all over the country have got to be waking up with a wicked, wicked case of buyer’s remorse right about now.

A serious candidate does not spend the whole week tossing around names and leading reporters around by the nose only to pick a Senator whose own Presidential campaign in this same election year lasted less time than the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. Did Obama confuse his list of Vice Presidential candidates with his list of pretentious blowhards who shouldn’t get within ten miles of his campaign? There is no one on this planet who thinks more highly of Joe Biden than Joe Biden and if you give him the chance, he will fill the air with a wearying haze of words telling you that very thing.

Keep on reading…