Bitsblog Via IPhone; Bleg

OK, I admit I don’t have an Iphone.

I gather some of you with them were having problems with it and this blog, though, (Totally unreadable, I hear)  and of course I want to help. I’ve added some code to clean up the Iphone display somewhat. Can one of you check it out and let me know if it looks OK now?

Jake Tapper has the tale of two takes, ABC News: 

“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” said Obama spox Bill Burton. “Gov. Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil, and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.”

That was Barack Obama’s first take on John McCain’s announcement of Sarah Palin as his choice for Veep.   This was BO’s revised take:

“We send our congratulations to Gov. Sarah Palin and her family on her designation as the Republican nominee for vice president,” said the Democratic ticket in a joint statement. “It is yet another encouraging sign that old barriers are falling in our politics.  While we obviously have differences over how best to lead this country forward, Gov. Palin is an admirable person and will add a compelling new voice to this campaign.”

The presidency is not tennis.   A president does not get do overs.   Barack Obama has marked tendicy to get it wrong the first time, as first and then revised take on the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Jeff Emanuel, Red State, draws a fifteen year penalty for piling on:

The current Governor and former mayor tapped to be the GOP number 2 boasts at least as much experience as the Democrats’ number 1, a current freshman Senator and former community organizer and state senate back-bencher whose entire foreign policy resume consists of a “courageous” speech he gave against the Iraq war, to Iraq war opponents, in 2002 — and more executive experience than anybody on either ticket.

At Three AM, you only get one take.

BBCT to Michelle’s readers…

Reader Brian wrote:

My secretary was just listening to channel 7 news on the thedenverchannel.com online.

The news guys had the audio on and did not know it.

They commented that they think McCain and Palin must be sleeping together.

They commented about Sara(h) Palin’s nice ass.

They said a lot of very unseemly things.

This seems like a big deal and they should be called on it. My secretary sent them an e-mail and they immediately cut off the audio…

…For myself, as the father of a little girl who I want recognized for her accomplishments and hard work, it was pretty offensive.

Amazing, what happens when Democrats are simply being themselves, huh? That was mere seconds after the announcement. A new low and a new record for time, too.

As Michelle suggests, this won’t be the last time.

And of course there’s a reason for that perception. Consider Hillary Clinton, whose sole reason for having the power she has today is because her erstwhile ‘husband’ repeatedly screwed around on her. Given Hillary Clinton as the example of the powerful woman, it’s logical to assume all women who attain positions of power, have similar backgrounds, or slept their way to the top.  This is in no small part, a fear reaction. They don’t understand it, so there’s only one possibility. Sex.

Thing is,  Palin,  in reality, presents no such attachments. Not only is this a woman who attained her position on her own, and without the soap opera,  she raised a family, with a special needs kid, while her Hubby was off earning a living, to boot.   These morons simply don’t understand it, and can find in their list of possibilities, only one condition for Palin to have been so successful.

Open minded, these Democrats. For possibly the first time in their lives they’re being confronted with a powerful woman who didn’t get her power from a bunch of know-nothings on a sympathy jag. And they simply don’t know how to cope. Or, maybe they just don’t like a powerful woman. Either way, what we’re witness to here is a fear reaction. Anyone who has seen a cornered raccoon, will tell you fear reactions can get pretty nasty.

I suggest to you there’s a lot of women out there who will be able to identify with Palin than did with Hillary Clinton.  And that has the Democrats nearly in a full-on panic at this point.

I’m going to take the unusual step of sending the news release out untouched from The Source, since with all the political goings on, there’s no way you’re going to hear much of it otherwise. You certainly won’t see it in the New York Times, or the paper serving Johnstown PA…. Get the hint?  (BBCT: Michelle)

Defend Our Marines | Nathaniel R. Helms | Thursday, August 28, 2008 [pdf]

Riverside, California – Jose L. Nazario, Jr is a free man.

A jury of nine women and three men needed six hours to decide the landmark case that also sends a warning to federal prosecutors about second-guessing warriors in combat.

Bedlam erupted in the US District Court when the bailiff announced “not guilty” on the third and final charge. Lead defense attorney Kevin B. McDermott, and his self-styled and unarguably dynamic “Marine Dream Team” that gutted the prosecution, joined the impromptu celebration with high fives and big grins.

Nazario was accused of manslaughter, abetting murder, assault, and feloniously using his weapon to kill somebody, the government said.

Despite two years of relentless effort by Special Agent Mark O. Fox and his team of NCIS investigators, no evidence to corroborate confusing witness testimony was ever found.

Juror Nicol Peeters said she sat in the boiling sun for an hour after the verdict, waiting for Nazario to come out of the courtroom so she could congratulate him.

“I never thought he was guilty,” she said.  “When we went in, it was nine to three for not guilty. By lunch there was only one juror who thought he was guilty,” she added. The hold-out kept saying, “but he killed somebody.”

The high school guidance counselor from Gavilan Hills, California said she couldn’t leave without giving the man she helped free a big hug. While she waited in the meager shade of the court house, Peeters explained why she helped set Nazario free.

“What happened to the other people who were supposed to be there?” she rhetorically asked, referring to Marine Corps Sergeants Ryan Weemer and Jermaine Nelson, Nazario’s co-defendants.  “We heard about them and then they weren’t here.”

Weemer and Nelson, who face courts martial later this year, are charged with murder and dereliction of duty at nearby Camp Pendleton. Both Marines face life sentences in addition to possible felonious criminal contempt charged if presiding US District Judge Stephen Larson decides to send them for another stay in the federal slammer.

“Who are we to decide what men in war are doing? My father was a military man in Belgium who went through World War II fighting the Germans. He understands,” Peeters said.

Moments later, Peeter was hugging Nazario’s mother Sandra Montanez and then Nazario himself. That led to another round of tearful embraces among family and friends congregating to congratulate Nazario.

The soft–spoken warrior clawed his way out of Spanish Harlem to be a decorated, stand-up sergeant of Marine Corps light infantry who was honorably discharged after eight grueling years. He was fired from his job as a Riverside police officer when NCIS special agents frog marched him through his own police headquarters.

That indignity was the beginning of a bruising year-long ordeal that left his house in hock to the government for bond money, and his wife and kid in upstate New York, while he sweated it out with his mother in murderously hot Riverside.

The government used another Marine to shabbily build a case against Nazario by taping phone conversations that were as disgusting in content as they were in motivation. Sgt. Jermaine Nelson, who later decided to risk imprisonment for refusing to testify, was used to try and entrap Nazario into saying he executed two insurgents and help dispose of two more.

Two jurors called the tape orchestrated by NCIS Special Agent Mark O. Fox a jumble of irrelevancies that raised the specter of who ordered Nazario to kill the prisoners rather then whether he did it of his own volition.

“I was actually looking for something from the government to sway me the other way,” said tobacco chewing real estate agent Ted Grinnell., from Lake Elsinore. “We had no idea about what happened before the trigger was pulled. We didn’t get to hear the whole story.”

The 36-year old Navy veteran said he would have voted to convict Nazario to “send the military the message it is not above the law” except the evidence was just not there.

Nazario’s father-in-law, Fred Jones, was in the US District Court every day of the trial. Jones retired to Riverside from Washington, D.C. to be near his daughter and grandson. He got there just in time to watch his beautiful new family go back to upstate New York to find a job after Nazario lost his.

Over doughnuts Thursday morning, Jones lamented that nobody hires suspected felons so Jose never did get a job.

Like everyone else in the courtroom, Jones was as jumpy as a scalded cat over what was inevitably going to come, except he tried not to show it. Every time the bailiff walked down the hallway the gather spectators and press started whispering and wondering if “they” were in yet.

While everyone waited, Jones commented that he thought it was a “hell of a way” to treat a young man “who did everything right and still got his ass kicked.”

While he was putting on his rider’s helmet after the verdict, Jones laughed a few times between bouts of moistening eyes. He said he is ready for his grandson and daughter to get back in their new house. It was collateral for the $50,00 bond the government demanded before setting Nazario free after he was arrested.

It took a year for the trial to get under way. When it finally did, it was as dramatic as it was important. It had all the elements of a great novel including colorful characters, rock hard warriors, calculating investigators and cold, business-like prosecutors who appeared to find the entire episode distasteful

Jerry Behnke, the Assistant US Attorney who led the hard hitting prosecution, walked out of the courtroom with very little comment after shaking hands with the defense team.

When he encountered the cameras waiting on the broiling sidewalk, he said he would respect the jurors decision and then walked away with out another word. NCIS Special Agent Fox dematerialized somewhere and was never seen again.

The Marine Dream Team was truly a piece of work. Among them there is enough rank to run a battalion including the company clerk, something former enlisted man Joe Preis never fails to bring up in banter.

He likes to call retired Marine Corps colonel Doug Applegate “the O-6” in reference to Applegate’s exalted rank. Preis was an artillery forward observer who fought with the Ninth Marines, the unenviable “Walkin’ Dead” that slammed through Somalia on that abortive peacekeeping mission. Applegate, who has an uncanny resemblance and manner to silky smooth Fred Astaire,  calls Preis “Stillborn.”

Now Preis is a lawyer at the silk stocking Pepper Hamilton LLP law firm that ponied up a tremendous amount of money to keep Nazario from getting bulldozed into the ground.

Without a strong defense, made possible by big bucks from Pepper Hamilton and aid from hundreds of private donors, Nazario faced a ten years of mandatory jail time.

The government never reveals what it spends, but sending two teams of NCIS investigators to Fallujah, Iraq to find an unblemished house filled with confused Iraqis who maybe bought it from somebody who moved to Syria is a glimpse of the time, money and energy the Feds were willing to expend.

Later at his hotel suite McDermott humbly offered that if it hadn’t been him and his Marine Dream Team another Marine would have stood up to face the heat.

McDermott has always been a maverick, according to Applegate. He has a special fondness for the young grunts that seem to always take the beating when things go wrong in the front office.

“That is what the Brotherhood of Marines is all about,” McDermott said.

Nathaniel R. Helms
Defend Our Marines
28 August 2008

Nat Helms is a Contributing Editor to Defend Our Marines. He is a Vietnam veteran, former police officer, war correspondent, and, most recently, author of My Men Are My Heroes: The Brad Kasal Story (Meredith Books, 2007).

Bruce McQuain at Q&O:

Oliver Willis asks on Twitter:

“How many qualified and tested Republican women did McCain pass over for Sarah Palin? “

About as many as the Democrats passed over to pick Barack Obama, Oliver.  Why?

LOL… sometimes these things write themselves, don’t they Bruce?

It’s true, though; Palin has more executive experience than Obama and Biden combined. Are the Democrats really sure they want to start this argument?

Holiday weekend, so this will be a short one… essentially a nod to the Ramble Tradition.

• As to the holiday itself, let me say this clearly: Labor unions have outlived their usefulness, and have evolved to the point where they are now not the solution. Rather, they are the problem. Why on earth do we still have a national holiday for them?
• A third place finish in OTB’s Caption contest. Pretty cheesy, really. Where the hell does Rodney come up with these things, anyway? Still reminds me of the Bleu Man Group. (They’re French, ya know) (OK, not really)
• Memorandum is going nutzoid with reax to Palin being picked by McCain… far more traffic, in my estimation than we saw with Biden.  Among them:Talking Points Memo, Think Progress, The Mahablog, Hot Air, Top of the Ticket, Weekly Standard Blog, Outside The Beltway, Washington Post, BlogHer, Firedoglake, Don Surber, Feministing, The Strata-Sphere, On Deadline, Comments from Left Field, Macleans.ca Blog Central, The Anonymous Liberal, DownWithTyranny!, Dayton Daily News, The Reaction, QandO, Donklephant The RBC TalkLeft, michellemalkin.com, TownHall Blog, CNN, Salon, Talking Points Memo, Betsy’s Page Stop The ACLU The Crypt’s Blogs, Ben Smith’s Blogs The Shotgun The Moderate Voice, Harry’s Place, The Bilerico Project, Redstate Debbie Schlussel, Reuters, Pajamas Media You’ll doubtless note a large number of left-siders in that list.  Particularly laughable among them is “Think Progress” trying to tar her with Ted Stephens… apparently they’re unaware of the extent she went to to unload the guy. I guess desperation makes you forget such things, huh?  Perhaps the best, though was Megan McArdle:
  

  “I was disappointed by the speech. Your mileage may vary, of course. But it was basically standard Democratic Convention Boilerplate: nothing we haven’t seen before from Obama, or for that matter, every Democratic presidential candidate in living memory.”

  Kudos to Megan.

• Oil rigs are being evacuated, too. Of course, you’d expect that… the Democrats don’t run them.
• Oh… speaking of energy.. another indication with Palin… She signed a bill, yesterday, that allows a Canadian company to build and operate a pipelie for Natural Gas from the North Slope.
• Interesting, this bit with the storm “Gustav”  headed for Louisiana, again. Apparently, this time, they’re actually taking the proper prepetory action, unlike last time.
• Isn’t it amazing? Time was a well qualified black person would be turned down for a high-level job because they were black. Today, we have someone whose only apparent qualification is he’s black. What a wonderful world.
• I see Bernie Ward is being sent up for 7 years.  Leave the soap where it falls, Bernie.
• Speaking of such things, Michael Jackson who celebrates his 50th birthday today, says he ‘feels very young’.  Ummmm… Very young WHAT, Michael?

I’ve cleaned up the front page a bit, as well as the footers on individual posts.

The object is to lighten the load a bit on the Database server, and get the page looking a bit cleaner. Individual posts still contain the “Related Post” fields  and other moderately useful stuff.

Problems?  Feedback’s the place.

The official Democrat Party Veep Hit list: 

Bobby Jindal
Mitt Romney
John Thune
Tom Ridge
Tim Pawlenty
Carly Fiorina
Charlie Crist
Fred Smith
Eric Cantor

Blind-sided baby!

Sarah Palin gives the McCain-Palin campaign some leverage to attack Obama a several fronts.    Obama supports infanticide.   Palin is pro-life in both word and deed.   BO talks about change.   Palin killed the Bridge to Nowhere.  While BO talks change, Palin does change.    Palin has the bona fides to attack BO’s insane idea of five dollar a gallon gasoline.  

I don’t know how long Howard Dean will keep list up.   I copied it a bit after Noon EDT.

 Hat tip and more, Jim Geraghty, National Review.

I said a short while ago, I wasn’t buying Palin as the VP choice until it came out officially. Apparently, it just did. Fox News Channel:

DAYTON, Ohio — A senior campaign official in the John McCain campaign confirmed to FOX News on Friday that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will name Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Palin emerged earlier in the day as the hot name in the VP sweepstakes after reports circulated that two short-listers — Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty — were out of the running.

Adding fuel to the Palin candidacy was a report that a charter aircraft from Anchorage owned by a McCain supporter had arrived at a small airport outside Dayton, Ohio, where McCain has scheduled a noon ET rally to announce his choice.

This is a fairly reasonable choice, given her own ‘maverick’ status in Alaska state politics, in my estimation. The question of it selling to the American people remains to be seen. I suspect it will, on a number of levels. Hillary Clinton voters, for one thing, will have to give her at least a serious glance.

Addendum: (David L)

The NBC story, here:

WASHINGTON – Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has chosen Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, campaign officials told NBC News on Friday.

The good news is that she not named Joe Lieberman, or Tom Ridge.    The blog reax I have seen is dynamic   This is a love or hate choice.   The Old Guy could have done worse. see above.

The latest chatter I’m hearing is on Palin.

Sister Toldjah seems to have this stuff down, though;

Instead of breathlessly reporting on every news report that comes out, I’m gonna wait until it’s actually confirmed before I blog about it

Yeah, that seems the best way.  No sense chasing shadows on this stuff.

Yes, I saw the speech last night. Let me be brief, because frankly, his dog and pony show deserves no more effort than that.

Obama, in the end, did and said nothing new. His speech was grandiose, certainly, but lacked specifics, except for a number of specific untruths, and illogical statements, which Surber does a very nice job doing examining.

Of course, the best indication I can think of that the whole thingw as a ball of leftist fluff, and not worth anyone’s time, is Sullivan, this morning, saying

It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety.

And Olberman’s rabid defense of it against AP’s Babington writing pretty much the same thing I did in the second paragraph here. (Is there any doubt that these two are totally in the tank?)

The Astute Bloggers wonder if Obama hasn’t given something away he’d rather not have.

Addendum:  (David L)

The aforementioned piece from Charles Babington, Associated Press

Obama seemed to say, Bring it on, we’re sticking to our theme: McCain equals Bush.

The Obaam campagn seems either unable, or unwilling to change the direction of their campaign.   Either they feel they have a magical game winning formula or the bash Bush campaign the best they can devise.  I’d bet the latter.  BO has lost something like eighteen primaries in row.   On a hot streak, he is not.   The Obama campaign was unwilling or unable to tone down the Messiah aspect even after if has become the fodder for McCain campaign commercials and with BO slipping.  

BO read a great speech from a teleprompter lasta night.  That is what BO does well, read speeches.  Sadly for BO, the Oval Office does not come equpped with a telepromter.

For all us who have either eat or drive, or both, and feed up with paying more at the pump for diluted gasoline and more for food, Henry Payne,  Climate Change Fraud:

The ethanol mandate: Raising your food prices while reducing your fuel mileage. What a deal

It is time to end the ethanol rip off and go back to undiluted real gasoline.

• Bad news for the Democrats. Better put the ‘resession on hold. How can they keep selling gloom and doom when these little bits of reality keep sneaking through?
• McCain has decided on a running mate. But of course we don’t know who that is, yet. Figure around 6pm or so, is my guess. We’ll update, of course.
• So Obama takes on WGN.
  

  “WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears,” Obama’s campaign wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “He’s currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers.”

  Only trouble, of course is that we’ve not seen one dispute of Kurtz’s facts. Not one. Even the callers to the show… which I did hear, by the way, were nothing short of bizzare, and  in truth, frantic.  And the idea that Kurtz is actually center left makes the whole thing laughable, if the kind of attacks we’re seeing on him were not so dangerous a precident to set, as we discussed earlier today. All this is of a kind with what happened to the ABC producer who was arrested  for photographing Democrats, apparently with Lobby types, yesterday.   There is no doubt in my mind, nor should there be in yours that these kind of thuggish tactics are what’s to be expected from an Obama administration. This is “Change”? Seems to me the LAST Democrat president we had tried to bully the opposition into silence, too… and you may recall how THAT worked out. So, you REALLY wanna go back to that?  If this guy doesn’t scare the poodles out of you, check your pulse. You may not have one.

•  Good for the LPGA.
• Similarly, A shout to Michelle Obama…. what about ‘illegal’ do you not understand?
• Barack Obama owned a Jeep? What would Al Gore say?
• Amazing, the amount of traffic Billy generates with one line. Thanks, pard.
• A long weekend, of course. I’ll be prepping the trailer for a run next weekend. Got a minor bug in the water heater I need to trace down. Yard work. Maybe a run to one of the wildlife reservations for a few hours.  The 45 and 50 degree temps we’ve been getting are the wakeup call that winter’s coming.
•  
•  

Jim Geraghty’s Law, National Review

:All Barack Obama statements come with an expiration date. All of them.

Barack Obama, as attributed by Ed Morrissey, Hot Air:

You know, I am a believer in … in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job. Uh, and I think that … if I were seriously to consider running on a national ticket, I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now there may be some people who are comfortable doing that, but I am not one of those people. — Barack Obama, 2004

Ed’s article includes what may be John McCain’s best campaign video yet.   But I suspect not for very long.  McCain’s videos keep getting better.  The BO campaign just gets more  desparate.

Yeah, I saw some of it last night. I turned it n last night just in time to see that thing under Bubba’s big red WC Feilds nose, say to the country what a great president he’d been.

My reaction: (gag!) Apparently Bubba doesn’t remember Somolia, where under his great leadership we turned tail and fled. Some leader, huh? (Click)

On thinking about it this morning, however, it occurrs to me that the really scary part about that scene is the number of people who agree with him; they think turning tail and running was the correct action.  Idiots, I’m afraid, are always going to be with us; You can’t fix stupid. Thereby there will always be such people, in some amount, but the question, once that’s admitted, is how to bring that number down to more tolerable levels.

I suggest and believe, as I have argued here for years, that the way to accomplish that is a concentration on reinforcement of the cultural values that made this country a great one initialy, the absense of which threatens us today.  The argument that Bill Clinton was a great president is simply not based on the logic as our culture has understood it for generations. It cannot be logically argued against logically, then, until we’re  most of us operating from the same culturally driven basis of logic.  In short, we have to concentrate on changing minds at a very foundational level. That takes time, my friends. And I wonder greatly if we really HAVE that much time in which to operate. My worry increases when I see spectacles like I did last night.

Funny thing; I mentioned this line of thought in last night’s Ramble…