So, is McCain a ‘Natural Born American’?

Why do I get the feeling that there’s desperation where McCain is concerned? The New York Times, this monring:

WASHINGTON – The question has nagged at the parents of Americans born outside the continental United States for generations: Dare their children aspire to grow up and become president? In the case of Senator John McCain of Arizona, the issue is becoming more than a matter of parental daydreaming.

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

That they’re even raising the question….(Chuckle) and it should be noted the only story on this as was found when I looked at around 4am local, was in the Times…. (Tell you anything?)… Of course, if the Democrats were behind this question… and the story, not surprisingly,  goes to some length to avoid making that connection, by the way…  they’d be cutting their own throat, given Romney would be the Nominee.

Addendum:  (David L)

Not an issue.   The Panama Canal Zone was sovereign United States territory,  until President James Earl Carter gave it away.

Oh by the way, do I own Jimmy an apology for using his full name?

Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned.

So says CTV this morning. 

Yeah, well, no shock for that. When Obama takes up a cause, it’s not because he particularly thinks it’s a good cause to take up, past the idea that it gives him leverage against his political enemy.

Rather like on his stand on Iraq, hmmm?

Addendum: (David L)

You gotta give the old guy credit.   He doesn’t give different stump speechs in different states and he doesn’t pander in any state.   What Barack Obama, and Mrs. Clinton, are doing in Ohio is attributing every job loss in a Rust Belt state to NAFTA.   The LA Times is not buying it:

The 14-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement has become a hot issue in this year’s Democratic presidential campaign — in Ohio, at least. When Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama hit the hustings in the Buckeye State, they compete to be NAFTA’s biggest critic. But when they jet to Texas, which is also holding its primary Tuesday, the candidates have little or nothing to say about the pact.

The disparity illustrates two truths about major trade deals: They’re a magnet for pandering, and they produce both winners and losers. Ohio, like other states in the Rust Belt, is stinging from the loss of manufacturing jobs in the years since NAFTA took effect. In Texas, however, communities near the border have blossomed with an influx of investment, jobs and workers

There lots of reasons Rust Belt states are losing jobs.   Blaming all lost jobs on NAFTA is merely scape goating.   Further, Obama and Mrs. Clinton are not running to be President Ohio, but rather President of the United States.   Overall NAFTA is a plus.

It appears so.

Maybe it was the fault of the building?

(CNN) — The building where a gunman killed five people at Northern Illinois University two weeks ago will be demolished, state officials said Wednesday

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s office confirmed that the state will provide the funding for the university to demolish Cole Hall, the site of Steven Kazmierczak’s February 14 rampage

‘Rat deserts Mrs. Clinton, Bob Kemper, Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

WASHINGTON – Hoping to put an end to a month of confusion and dismay, Rep. John Lewis on Wednesday said he’s switching his support from Sen. Hillary Clinton to Sen. Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Lewis cited the overwhelming preference for Obama in his district as a reason for his change of heart, but he also talked about Obama’s campaign as transformational for the nation.

Pinch Sulzberger, call your office, Rasmussen:

Just 24% of American voters have a favorable opinion of the New York Times. Forty-four percent (44%) have an unfavorable opinion and 31% are not sure. The paper’s ratings are much like a candidate’s and divide sharply along partisan and ideological lines.

Hot Air is full of the Captain:

The Democrats have discovered just how badly they have constructed their college of delegates in this cycle. They have used the superdelegate structure since the mid-1980s, but no one foresaw how that could appear when two candidates split the vote almost equally. Now one the architects of the Democratic delegate structure defends the concept in today’s Washington Post by saying what no one else will the Establishment is smarter than the electorate:

The many voices of Mrs. Clinton, Maureen Dowd, New York Times:

After saying she found her “voice” in New Hampshire, she has turned into Sybil. We’ve had Experienced Hillary, Soft Hillary, Hard Hillary, Misty Hillary, Sarcastic Hillary, Joined-at-the-Hip-to-Bill Hillary, Her-Own-Person-Who-Just-Happens-to-Be-Married-to-a-Former-President Hillary, It’s-My-Turn Hillary, Cuddly Hillary, Let’s-Get-Down-in-the-Dirt-and-Fight-Like-Dogs Hillary.

All bad.

Barack Obama  Advocate:

The Obama campaign is lavishing some of its cash advantage on LGBTs with targeted ad buys in Ohio and Texas leading up to the critical March 4 primaries in both states (Rhode Island and Vermont also vote that day). According to Obama LGBT steering committee member Eric Stern, the campaign has just completed an ad buy with queer newspapers in the four largest LGBT markets of those two states — Columbus, Cleveland, Dallas, and Houston

Says a lot.

• Next time you hear from anyone about how the Democrats are uniting America, show them this.
• Or this.
• Or, this.
• On the other hand, there is some coming together on this issue.
• Seems to me this is a sure sign of Clinton campaign desperation (First story)
• So is this.
• Ya know, if the this situation were the other way around, it wouldn’t be news.
• David’s already mention the passing of Bill Buckley. Sorry he’s gone, but I suppose he’s not really lost given the bodyof work available to all of us on the web… a volume I expect will go up a bit now that he’s gone. Billy mentions something about him, though that irritates the both Billy and myself:
  

  “Now listen, you: stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your goddamned face, and you’ll stay plastered.”
  (Buckley, to Gore Vidal)

  You know, one of the things that always bored me with Buckley was the essential hypocrisy of treating disreputable sonsofbitches respectfully. This is what all the weepers today will refer to as his “civility” or being a “gentleman”.

  True. And you know, that kind of smarmy ‘respect’ for the disrespectable, has been under the surface of my perceptions about John McCain for a long time, too, particularly since 2000 or so. Major turn-off.  It’s something I have always been uncomfortable with in W, as well.  Billy goes on to point out that had Buckley given into some of the swashbuckling whim inherrent in his response to Vidal, he might have had a bit more respect for him. Yeah me, too….  And I wonder, along those same lines, what it’s going to take to get a John McCain to start treating the unrespectable, as such.  Obama, and the Clintons for example. Or, Howard Dean. Etc.  I may touch on this as the election progresses, because I think this restraint to be an undesireable trait in a leader. It’s great for a high-school debate society, but counter productive in a leader of the level of the POTUS.

• (Addendum: Bit… Apparently, I’m not alone, here.)
• Snowing here. 5 inches in the last 24 hours. Not all that unusual for here. I was interested to see we had more snow this season than we’ve had since 1966.  And boy do I remember the snow around here in 66…. Another day, I’ll get into that one. I don’t wanna get too depressed… I still gotta SHOVEL this stuff, tonight.

Gaius has word of a real toilet exploding scenario.

How’d you like to be the butt of this joke?

Boy, the chili they serve at these nursing homes…

Oh, never mind. Just go see.

Jonah Goldberg, whose book I have really got to sit down and read, remarks yesterday:

‘Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.”

This excerpt from William Ayers’ memoir appeared in the New York Times on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — a few hours before Al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Ayers, once a leader in the Weather Underground — the group that declared “war” on the U.S. government in 1970 — told the Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Ayers recently reappeared in the news because Politico.com reported Friday that Barack Obama has loose ties to him. Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is apparently a left-wing institution in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, and Obama visited Ayers’ home as a rite of passage when launching his political career in the mid-1990s. The two also served on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago, which gave money to Northwestern University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers’ wife (and former Weather Underground compatriot) Bernardine Dohrn is the director.

I don’t think Obama supports domestic terrorism, and I’m sure he can offer eloquent explanations for why he shouldn’t suffer any guilt by association. The Clinton campaign, however, did try to score a few political points, meekly linking to the Politico story on the campaign website’s blog. The campaign probably couldn’t be more aggressive without calling attention to how President Clinton pardoned Puerto Rican separatist terrorists, perceived to be a way to gain support for Hillary’s Senate bid from left-wing Puerto Ricans in New York.

What fascinates me, though, is how light the baggage is when one travels from violent radicalism to liberalism.

(The bolding is my own)

The WaPo’s Irony laden “Fact Checker” goes to bat for Obama…

The question is not whether a connection can be established between Barack Obama and a former member of the Weathermen, but whether it has any significance for the 2008 presidential campaign.

(Snort!) Oh, I think it does.

Here’s the thing; The damage that is inflicted on Obama by this association is decidedly not that he is stupid enough to directly support terrorism, but that he is willing to suborn the radical leftist politics which lead to it.  This in fact is the elephant in the room, where Democrats are concerned.  Their linkages to radicals. Radicals who say things like:

“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” Ayers was widely quoted as saying at the time (though he told the Times he couldn’t remember if he said it).

Well, yes, drugs will do that for you.  But look closely at the politics being espoused by both Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama, and in fact, the bulk of the Democratic Party today. Explain to me how the proposals they’ve been pushing.. tax the rich, et al, is really so much different.  The only difference that I can see between this idiot Ayers, and the Democratic presidential candidates, is the latter have a tendency to use a weapon that is far more powerful than the explosives Ayers used: They use the more destructive weapon we call “Good Government”.

The goal in the end, is the same.

And as to the effect of this linkage…. if someone digs up a pic of the two together…. he won’t have Hillary Clinton to blame for it. Oh… I should note that Ayers is not the only link to radicalism. Go look up the name Bernardine Dohrn.  Look also at Ben Smith’s column of the other day. This isn’t going away anytime soon.

Larry Johnson a few weeks ago, suggested that Ayers will be Obama’s Willie Horton, given the age of Terrorism. And I think he’s right. The American people are going to question, I think, if someone who associates with such an individual, and shares similar goals, if not the exact methods used, is what we really want in charge of our nation’s security.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review:

I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died overnight in his study in Stamford, Connecticut.

After year of illness, he died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas

We lost a great one.

Richard Cohen, Washington Post, offers to plan to save Mrs. Clinton’s campaign:

There is dissension in the Hillary Clinton camp. Top aides have been in arguments, shouting back and forth about differences in strategy. Should Clinton come on strong? Should she go negative? Should she be upbeat and positive? Here’s my answer: Stop campaigning.

The evidence is overwhelming that since Super Tuesday, the minute that Clinton steps foot in a state, her numbers start to plummet.

Read all of Cohen’s column.   Wish I could have quoted it all.   Alas. 

The Clintons have made ad nuseum reference to all her hard work.   The key to success has been said to be Work Smarter, Not Harder.    So while Mrs. Clinton may be a hard worker, her campaign was doomed because she just isn’t all that smart.

Sure looks that way.

Sweetness and Light is following this one.

The NY Observer, yesterday:

The argument that the constant carping about Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been a function of an Obama-friendly, process-obsessed media is well and good. But how, then, to explain the deeply held dissatisfaction of an old Clinton loyalist like Leon Panetta?

In an interview with The Observer, Mr. Panetta compared Mrs. Clinton’s top strategist Mark Penn to Karl Rove, suggested that the Clinton campaign had totally underestimated Barack Obama’s appeal, and complained about the overall lack of planning that he said had characterized the former First Lady’s bid to return to the White House.”I never considered him someone who would run a national campaign for the presidency,” he said.
He asserted that Mr. Penn “comes from an old school, like Karl Rove-it’s all about dividing people into smaller groups rather than taking the broader approach that was needed.”

Arrrrrr. Sorry, wrong answer, Leon.

First of all, as far as a political operative goes, Mark Penn is nowhere near in the same league as Karl Rove.  Sorry, completely different pieces of the puzzle.  That would seem self-evident, given the success of Karl Rove, versus the abject failure of Mark Penn in the same relative role.  I would certainly put Mark Penn in the same class as Patti Solis Doyle, for example. I recognize that’s not very complimentary, but the truth is often painful to liberals. This is one such situation.

Secondly, the problem was not the appeal of Hillary Clinton’s opponent… rather, the problem is the lack of appeal of Hillary Clinton herself.

Those two situations combine to create an unwinable campaign.

Witness; In general, and in particular in the case of Penn and Doyle, both, Hillary Clinton surrounded herself with true believers.  These are people who would never in their wildest bad dreams think that their candidate was unappealing to the American people, much less be able to deal with the problem once it was identified. So convinced were they that everyone else saw the same messianic creature they did, they figured all they had to do was stand her up, announce she was taking the White House back, and America would fall in line behind her.  The idea that she would actually have to justify herself to the American people, never entered the minds of these true believers.The fact, long touted, of Hillary Clinton’s high negatives, was never addressed because her campaign was in denial that such negatives existed.

Which would seem to explain rather nicely, the look of shock on the Clinton campaign workers this morning. And  Panetta’s whining, as well. Notice that even in this, Panetta is disconnected from the reality that no plan on earth could have overcome Hillary Clinton’s own history.

So at this stage of the game, what we are down to is how Hillary Clinton is going to react when she sees someone else sworn in as president of the United States.  One gets the impression it’s not going to create a pretty picture.

Rich Lowry, last night:

 Who would have guessed three months ago that Hillary would be the desperate out-of-sorts underdog nipping at the ankles of the cool, in-control frontrunner, Barack Obama, in what is probably the final Democratic debate?

Funny you should mention that, Rich.

Rove did.

If Penn was of Rove’s quality, he’d have seen it, too.

Neil Boortz, yesterday:

Harvard University is caving in the matters of “multi-cultural education.”  In order to make Muslim women more comfortable using the gym, Harvard has decided to try instituting a woman-only access time for the gym.  Six hours a week, the gym will be open only for females in order to accommodate their religious customs.

Here’s what Ola Aljawhary, Harvard’s Islamic Society’s Islamic Knowledge Committee officer, has to say.  “We live together in one community, it only makes sense for everyone to compromise slightly in order for everyone to live happily,” she said. “This matter is simple: Can’t we just display basic decency and show tolerance and inclusion for people not a part of the mainstream majority?”  Let’s watch this unfold.  First it’s female-only gym time.  Then we’ll see footbaths in every building on campus.  Then it will be no pork in the dining halls.  All females must dress modestly in order to not offend a Muslim … what’s to stop this culture of accommodation from spreading?  It doesn’t.  But it’s all in the name of multi-cultural education.

Boortz asks:

When do we make a stand and tell these people ‘NOT ONE MORE INCH”?

Look Neal, I understand why you’re saying that.  I understand the implication.  But what you’re not addressing is the idea of logic….

On what logical basis, would we raise objections now, after having spent so many years, Butt kissing with these people?  On what basis would we say no to their demands that wouldn’t run directly afoul of what we’ve already done?  We gave them the tools to fight us with. The legal precedent has already been set. We opened ourselves up to this nonsense in both a llegal and moral sense. under the guise of “Civil rights”.  The dam has already been leaking for some years, now.

To accomplish what you suggest would require that at the outset,we seriously rethink what we call “rights” today. Such a rethinking would require my definition saying as a unified body of people that what we have been doing on these matters all along is dead wrong. Given what we’ve just witnessed in the primary season of this election, I suppose you know what kind of a chance we have of that occurring anytime soon.

Let’s take a little trip back in time…  I recognize many of my readers were not even alive back then, but… let’s try.
Think back to the election… the general, back 1989…when Bush41 was running against Mike Dukakas. Remember the polling data which until two weeks or a little less before the election, were swearing that Ol “Tanker Mike” was gonna run away with the thing?  I said at the time on the old GT network where I was holding court at the time, that the numbers were way off, and some rapid changes were going to need to be made lest the reality show up and make the pollsters… and the news orgs commissioning them… out to be liars.  Lo, and behold,  within the last week and a half the fastest polling swing ever, toward Bush. On election day, Bush ran away with it all, in even larger fashion than the pollsters had a chance to catch up to by then. The polling people couldn’t explain it, though the News Orgs liked to blame the Dukakis Tank photo.

So, jump ahead just a bit… say, 19 years. To, well, to Today in fact. Glenn passes along this link from DailyTech.com which opens with:

 Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

In fact, what we see now, has wiped out the warming trend, supposedly caused by Man.

Of course right away, one of the commenters to that site suggests the argument is no longer about “Global Warming” but rather, now, it’s about “Climate Change”. Apparently the buzzword got changed to meet the arguments about how the Enviro-whackos had originally giving us dire warnings about “Global Cooling” back in the 70’s.  Again, and as with Dukakis back in the 80’s, the myth gets changed so as to meet the reality of the situation without risking the myth outright, and thereby whatever degree of leftist control that can be salvaged from the situation. Indeed, that buzz phrase was apparently changed within the last year. But once again, not quite fast enough to meet the reality… people still remember calling it “Global Warming”, and so are a little curious about how that meshes with current events.

McQ notes the same link, by way of Keith at A Second Hand Conjecture :

 Not only do we have all the sea ice back, we have more than we once had. Record low temps. Record snowcover. And record global temperature drops.

The reason? Well apparently, like many of us have been saying all along, that big old yellow fiery thing that hangs in the sky every day has a big effect on our world’s temperature:

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Or as many of us have been saying, it strains credulity to believe that man’s minuscule contribution of a single gas is somehow responsible for the warming of the entire globe.

Well, yeah… but see, without that element, the left wouldn’t be able to dominate our every move.

Think about it; Our energy policy… as drven by global warming fears, worries about individuals and compnaies being able to make a buck,  and relentless screaming about ‘the environment’ have left us with an unworkable energy and environmental; policy which has us paying $3.50/gal for gasoline, and so on.

With this in mind, you’d think the logical way to proceed would be to throw off the draconian energy policy we’ve been suffering with. But wait; Why do THAT, when we can claim that our burning Fossil Fuels is what’s causing “Global Cooling?”  And the solution, of course, will be exactly the same prescriptions once leveled to combat ‘Global Warming”.

And you watch… within four years, people… that’s exactly what we will see.

[Mrs. Clinton] claims she’s ready to lead on Day One. But what about Day Two if Day One doesn’t go well? She’ll need to turn to her kitchen cabinet, not everything and the kitchen sink. Because facing the unknown is the only truly inevitable event any politician can bank on

Amy Holmes, Anderson Cooper 360, via Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review.

• A second place in the OTB Caption Contest.
• So, they’re concerned about a doctor shortage in the third world? And they think the US is causing the shortage? Look, Gang, I’m used the the US getting blamed for everything. But how is this our fault? I mean, how many of these people would BE doctors without us educating them? It’s not the US’s fault they stay here instead of going back to the hell-hole where they came from. But Dale’s article does show rather clearly how devoid of logic the International Court is. And I agree with the apparent read that we should be telling that body to go fornicate itself.
• Bluto:
  

  In a thinly veiled effort to drape Obama in the mantle of JFK, RFK, and MLK, New York Times writer Jeff Zeleny, uses a little fearmongering in a “noble” cause, of course:

  DALLAS — There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?

  RFK and MLK are mentioned early, but note the dateline (JFK is invoked later on). What a clever little bit of subliminal propaganda.

  Message: “We don’t know of any credible threats, but Barack might be targeted because he is John, Robert, and Martin all rolled up into one hopey-changey package and everyone knows that non-progressives are dangerous maniacs who play with guns.”

  Yeah, well, about that… the only credible threat I see to Obama is from Hillary Clinton. Ask Vince Foster about what happens to people that get between the Clintons… particularly Hillary… and Power.

• If anyone doubts that one of the keys to capitalism is the environmet which gave it life… it’s culture, and it’s language, one need only look at what Crazy Uncle Hugo is trying to do…
• Ya know, it occurs to me that the Democrats give “Grass Roots” a different meaning. Who but someone continually toking could come up with some of this stuff?
• Is it just me, or is Obama playing both sides of this Nation of Islam endorsement?