Silver Linings

I’m going to update this post during the day as any silver linings come to light.

One, of course, is the big win for marriage.

In California, while  stupid things like 1A and 2 seem to be passing, and 4 is sadly losing, at least it looks like 11 is winning. In terms of leverage to fix things in this country-sized insane asylum that could be huge. And one idiotic idea, 10, is losing. One of the best California silver linings is that Tom McClintock is ahead of Pelosi puppet Charlie Brown – but only by 451 votes. Absentee ballots still need to be counted.

Another California silver lining: Both Prop 7 and Prop 10 failed. Yay!

Update:

Yes, 11 won. That’s about the best I could hope for around here. Let’s hope it works.

What Next?

I’ll use this post as a place to gather ideas on what to do next. If you have suggestions, please leave a comment.

The first thing that occurred to me is how vital it is to protect the integrity of the voting process, especially now that ACORN, the professional voter fraud organization, has their man in the White House. It’s just insane and suicidal how easy voter fraud is in this country. In many states, including mine, poll workers aren’t even allowed to ask for ID. So I think we should push, nationwide, for:

1. Photo ID requirements for voting.
2. Reviewable paper trails for all ballots.
3. Safeguards against multiple votes – which could tie in to #1.
4. English-only ballots.*
5. Make fraudulent registration a felony for both the registrar and the registree.

* If you can’t understand English well enough to vote a ballot, you don’t understand it well enough to understand the issues. And spare me any accusations of “racism”. Race has nothing to do with language. It’s a great advantage for people to be bilingual – all of us in my family are – but it’s a disadvantage for a country to have multiple official languages. Language is culture. And multiculturalism is death.

Jim Manzi writes of a two-day discussion on this topic happening at Slate.

Some good ideas there: Vouchers. Yes, a lot of the blame for yesterday’s debacle goes to public schools – or, as Lee Rodgers calls them – “ignorance factories”. If this country is to survive we have to get the NEA’s stranglehold off of our children’s brains. And don’t forget the universities:

Preliminary indications are that the youth vote (ages 18-29) was way up:  an increase of somewhere over 2.2 million (maybe way over) from 2004 (a year in which it was very high), and as much as 13% over 2000.  The Left’s dominance of the academy is now having a material impact on electoral politics.  As we think about the future of conservatism, we ignore that at our peril.

Roger Kimball’s new edition of Tenured Radicals seems like an excellent starting point for that urgent discussion.

Ties in with this:

We’re getting beat on the ground, on campus, and in new technologies. Republicans should get as many smart 20-30 year olds in a room as possible ASAP and figure out how to mobilize people to spread Republican enthusiasm and use new technology (twitter, Facebook, text messaging, social networking, etc.) to do it. We also have to find a way to raise money and hit all 50 states.

Dr. Helen suggests working on getting more R’s in the Senate.

I wonder if Arnold Schwarzenegger might run against Barbara Boxer for her Senate seat…

Here’s one case where even a complete RINO like Schwarzenkennedy would be an improvement. There aren’t many senators to the left of Boxer, and one of them is moving to the other end of Pennsylvania Ave.

Fight

The good news: America has elected its first black president. The bad news: He’s a Marxist.

What to do?

Fight.

For those inclined to make nice, which of the following Democratic agenda items are you prepared to sign on to so that you’ll get invited to the right parties?

• Employee Free Choice Act
• Fairness Doctrine
• Freedom of Choice Act
• Nationalization of health care
• Estate tax increases
• “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” (driver’s licenses for illegals)
• Capital gains tax increases
• Defense cuts
• Liberal judicial appointments
• Racial and ethnic preferences
• Income tax increases
• Bans on oil drilling
• Global poverty tax/Kyoto

These are but a few. Perhaps the most worrisome agenda items are those that will betray a fecklessness in foreign policy that could lead to a nuclear Iran, a vulnerable Israel, an imperial Russia, and an imploding Pakistan.

Update:

Michelle Malkin says Gird your loins, conservatives.

What He Said

Derb is feeling sour.

I’m sour about the GOP too. What did it all get us, those 8 years of pandering and spending? If GWB had turned his face against from new entitlements, closed the borders, deported the illegals, held the line on calls to loosen mortgage-lending standards, starved the Department of Education, and declined those invitations to mosque functions, would the GOP be in any worse shape now?

Yes. Let’s remember that the GOP lost this election. And Bush, while he got us one tax break and eventually got the right guys in charge of the war, was a pretty poor president. I’m still convinced he’s a decent man – and suspect that part of him will be missed greatly these next four years – but he wasn’t much of a president. He ended up being the lefty squish I pegged him for in the runup to 2000.

Meanwhile, Perry de Havilland sees a silver lining.

Many will find the glee of the statist left over the next few days and weeks hard to endure, but to be honest I have been walking around with a grin all day. Finally the era of gradualism is over and the masks are going to come off. The USA has voted for statism and it is going to get exactly what it voted for at a juncture in history where it will very quickly be impossible to hide the cost of those votes.

Obama is not the start of a new era, he is the death knell for the old one.

I hope he’s right. H.L. Mencken certainly was:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

We Have Overcome

Jim Manzi is right.

There are about 1,460 days until the next Presidential election, and I assume that I will spend approximately the next 1,459 of them opposing Barack Obama. But I’m spending today proud abut what my country has overcome.

It’s a shame our first black President is this one, the callow Marxist. But Manzi has seen the historical silver lining.

As much as this is a step forward (and hey, Democrats, I voted for a black presidential candidate before you did) I really worry about the step leftward, thus downward,  the country has taken.

“You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down –up to man’s age-old dream–the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.” — Ronald Reagan

I hope we can also overcome an Obama presidency.

And please – count how many riots we get tomorrow.

Hatred

Some folks apparently want to go back to the days of tar and feathers. This ad is so over the top hateful it’s actually funny. Especially when you realize these “missionaries” are too old, have no name tags, and need haircuts.

Care to place bets on the average IQ of anybody actually convinced to vote no on 8 by this? My money is somewhere around room temperature.

Update:

I should have mentioned that neither “lesbian” looks the part. I live near Berkeley, and I know. They’re way too good looking, and at least one of them needs cropped hair and tattoos.

Election Day

Note: I’m going to use this post, updating it during the day, for random observations on the election.

This update gets stuck in at the top. It’s a live map of the results from Google. You can do all the usual Google Map things with it. For example, double click on Kentucky and you can see it county by county.

There were lines at my polling place this morning. That’s unusual. And there were goons from “No on 8” surrounding my polling place and another one in town that I passed. I complained to one of the poll workers. I some how doubt they’ll get shooed away. Later in the day I found more No on 8 goons outside an Emeryville polling place. But, then, being slippery about voting laws is what the Left is all about. Hey, at least they weren’t the Black Panthers.

Meanwhile, if you own a gun or can read simple English (and thus know that the “right to keep and bear arms” means “the right to own and carry weapons”) you should listen to this before heading to the polls.

And remember: EXIT POLLS ARE ALWAYS WRONG.

BTW, I have to thank Obama for starting my day off with a laugh. I heard him on the radio saying that he was “deeply humbled”. I laughed so hard I nearly drove up the sidewalk. The only thing funnier would be Joe Biden saying “I’m speechless.”

Check this out:

CNN says “I think that’s against the law, but it’s OK.” OK with CNN, for sure.

And here’s the cartoon that convinced John Derbyshire to vote McCain.

The One Thing To Remember About Exit Polls

They are always wrong.

A reminder from Steyn:

So remember: In about 15 hours or so the rumors and leaks are going to start – It’s an Obama landslide! Exit polls show him winning North Carolina by 15 points! In Vermont, McCain will be the first major party candidate not to break into double digits…

It’s all rubbish. Exit polls skew Dem. In 2004, they overstated Kerry’s support by 5.5 points. Which doesn’t sound a lot. But, given that there were only ten states where the margin of victory was less than 5%, that was enough to make Kerry briefly appear the winner. The point of all the afternoon leakage is to depress turnout in the Florida panhandle and points west. Don’t fall for it.

The media have been hailing the inevitability of Obama ever since Iowa. To their credit, Democrat primary voters paid no heed. The more Chris Matthews and the rest of the gang insisted it was over, the more obstinately Hillary Dems turned up to vote for her. Captain Landslide wound up being dragged by the media across the finish line in slow motion. If the Democrat base declined to take its marching orders from Tingle-Me Elmo back in the spring, there’s no reason for Republicans to do so six months later.

If this is to be a losing year, so be it. It’s still better to lose 51-49 than 59-41. This’ll be a weird day, and history will be made however it turns out: first black president, first female veep, oldest president, most hair-plugged veep. That’s excitement enough, without falling for exit poll rumors that will almost certainly prove false.

Obama’s Religion

Orson Scott Card hits another one into the bleachers.

“Cap and trade” plans have already been tried, and they don’t work — they cost too much, and people find ways to get around them. But Obama promises us that he’ll take that failed idea and be “as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s” plan.

In other words, if it doesn’t work, let’s do more of it!

This is Obama the New Puritan. We’ve found his real religion: Political and Environmental Correctness.

It’s more important to him to eliminate coal than to find practical solutions. Why? Because coal is “bad.” Our groupthinking “intellectual” elite thinks they are post-religious — but they believe in sin and hate the sinners.

The Best Anti-Obama Spots

typically star Obama. Why is that?

(The editing could be better, but it works.)

Classy

Remember that videotape of Obama frolicking with a terrorist, the tape the LA Times won’t release? Someone asked Columbia University to help get it released. The reply?

Yeah, right…loser

Those Obama supporters sure are classy.

One Parody More?

OK, maybe this isn’t supposed to be parody. Maybe Obamabots are just that un-self-aware. At least I think they think they’re serious.

Bird Man of Chicago

When Charles posted this at LGF I was inclined to give Obama the benefit of a doubt. I couldn’t see any smirk when he supposedly gave McCain the finger.

But, taken in context with this, it does make one wonder.

Looking Back at Obama’s First Four Years

Obama 2012: His Triumphs Abroad.

Looking back on the four years of his first administration, President Obama can be proud: He made the US welcome among the family of nations again; he reduced our reliance on military force; and he gave us peace by reaching sensible accommodations with our enemies.

The lies told about him in the 2008 election were exposed as sheer bigotry. Far from being “soft on radical Islam,” President Obama was the first world leader to welcome Jewish refugees after Iran’s nuclear destruction of Israel’s major cities (his only caveat – a fair one – was the refusal to accept Zionist military officers and their families, in light of Israel’s excessive retaliation).

He also demonstrated his resolve in the face of extremism when he overruled the obstructionist advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ordered our military to cross the border into Pakistan in force. The subsequent debacle, as Pakistan cut off supply routes to Afghanistan and threatened a nuclear response, was entirely the fault of our generals on the ground, not of the administration.

Fortunately, President Obama’s willingness to talk to our enemies rescued the situation. After laying down their arms, our troops were allowed to evacuate Pakistan and Afghanistan in peace. The Taliban’s return to power in Kabul did not result in an excessive bloodbath, and al Qaeda is not permitted the unrestricted freedom it enjoyed in the country prior to 2001.

Read the whole thing.

Pricing Signals

Pricing signals do work, of course. Just look at gasoline consumption over the last year. But Obama has a Marxist view of where pricing signals come from and how they work.

So go ahead and vote for this guy. Just ignore the fact that half the nation’s energy comes from coal. Remember that one man’s skyrocketing energy costs are just another man’s pricing signals.

Update:

For some reason the people who provide the coal aren’t happy about this.

Good Question

Is George Will smarter than a third-grader?

Apparently, third-graders in Georgetown are taught a much more comprehensive version of civics than I ever got in high school or law school (not to mention law professors themselves). It isn’t until the fourth grade that they learn about the hidden “ha ha, just kidding” clause of Article I, Section 3 or the corresponding “ha ha, not kidding this time” clause that kicks in in the event of a tie. It’s probably not until the fifth or sixth grade that they learn about the hidden clause in Article II that assigns some unspecified executive roles to the Vice President (aside from waiting around for the President to die, be impeached or otherwise become incapacitated – inert “duties” which could just as easily deem the Speaker of the House, the Senate president pro tem, or anyone else in the presidential succession an “executive” as well).

Meanwhile, on the War Front

Apparently Jan Debont and some good CG artists are helping with a campaign aimed at promoting peaceful reform in Islam, called No Terror. I can’t understand the written nor spoken language of the spots, but I’m pretty sure I get the idea. It’s something to be encouraged.

I’m Shocked. Shocked!

To find that a Chicago machine politician is taking illegal contributions!

If this were John McCain’s campaign, a deafening “what did he know and when did he know it?” chorus would have begun well over a week ago.

Update:

I wonder if he’d extend this logic to campaign finance laws.

Remember those posters?

I guess we’re still searching for some pro-Obama material that isn’t steeped in Stalin.

Check out the dog.

Oh, I know. I’m probably taking it out of context.

Write Your Own Caption

Try to keep it clean.

Try.

It Ain’t Over

Obi Wan points to the signs.

One final point to keep in mind about McCain’s campaign.  The public measures a candidate on personal qualities and his stands on the issues. But they also want to see how he runs a campaign – for them it’s a sign of whether he can handle a presidency. McCain was able to recover from losing his lead when the economic crisis hit and come back from a lackluster second debate and then developed a good message for the last debate and rest of the campaign. And his campaign has made smart strategic decisions about spending their money. McCain is finishing strong; he’s showing will. At a subliminal level, voters pick that up.

Spread the Wealth Around

Our new National Anthem?

You Don’t Have to Vote for McCain nor Obama

Michael Yon wants you to vote for Bill Gurley.

Nuts, Bolts

And plumbing.

Update:

Obama has weighed in, and come down firmly on the side of… Obama.

“I’ve stated my opposition to this. I think it’s unnecessary,” Obama told MTV. “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about.”

That’s the clear, incisive thinking you’d expect from a man who taught constitutional law. Given how bad reporters are these days perhaps he’s being misquoted, and the word “prohibit” really referred to “from something” when he said it. Who knows?

Let’s just be ready to remind him that he’s opposed, apparently, to “playing around with constitutions”.

Still Undecided?

Thinking you might vote for Barak Obama? Before you do, read Stanley Kurtz’s Senator Stealth.

Kurtz provides a summary:

Have you ever heard of the Gamaliel Foundation? Neither has anyone else. Certainly, the press has avoided the topic. Yet Barack Obama’s very first “community organizer” experience came when he was working for the Gamaliel Foundation. What does the Gamaliel Foundation believe? It turns out that Gamaliel follows an anti-American ideology quite like that of Jeremiah Wright. You’d think that would be news. Yet perhaps for that very reason, so-called news organizations have avoided the issue.

“Senator Stealth” goes on to show how a pattern of stealthy and incremental radicalism is second nature to the community organizers Obama worked with. When Obama tells us that his political worldview was shaped, above all, by his days as a community organizer, I believe him. Up to now, however, Obama has relied on the fact that nobody knows what community organizers actually believe in or do. In “Senator Stealth,” I offer a detailed explanation of what Obama’s favorite community organizers are all about.

I’ve long been suspicious and skeptical of politicians claiming to be “common-sense pragmatists”. Now I know why. Read the whole thing. No matter who wins Tuesday, this is stuff you need to know. And the Gamaliel and ACORN radicals aren’t going away next week no matter what.

Even after becoming a U.S. senator, Obama has maintained his ties to the Gamaliel Foundation. According to an October 2007 report for the University of California by Todd Swanstrom and Brian Banks, “it is almost unheard of for a U.S. Senator to attend a public meeting of a community organization, but Senator Obama attended a Gamaliel affiliate public meeting in Chicago.” Given this ongoing contact, given the radicalism of Gamaliel’s core ideology, given Obama’s close association with Gamaliel’s co-founder, Gregory Galluzzo, given Obama’s role as a Gamaliel consultant and trainer, and given Obama’s outsized role in channeling allegedly “nonpartisan” funding to Gamaliel affiliates (and to his political ground troops at ACORN), some questions are in order. Obama needs to detail the nature of his ties to both Gamaliel and ACORN, and should discuss the extent of his knowledge of Gamaliel’s guiding ideology. Ultimately, we need to know if Obama is the post-ideological pragmatist he sometimes claims to be, or in fact a stealth radical.

Frankly I’ve never seen him as all that stealthy. But if you still think Obama is “pragmatic”, consider your eyes opened.

Daylight Stupid Time

I’ve never liked Daylight Savings Time. It’s the kind of inane idea only a government could embrace. It’s for people who think they can make the carpet runner longer by cutting some off of one end and sewing it on the other. For years, when I was a kid, I refused to change my clocks. I simply went places an hour earlier during the summer. If that’s what you want to do, then fine. It doesn’t mean we should all lie about what time it is.

I’ll bid it good riddance tomorrow for another half of a year, as tonight the government returns to me the hour of sleep it stole last spring.

I don’t like DST.

But I’m willing to make exceptions.

Back in 1999, terrorists on the daylight-saving West Bank built several time bombs, delivered to co-conspirators in Israel and scheduled to explode at a set time. Problem was, Israel had just switched back to standard time, so the only people injured were the terrorists themselves when the bomb detonated an hour earlier than they expected and killed them all.

Shortest Anti-Obama Ad Ever

Listen to Rush’s Gut

It’s rarely wrong.

…Obama’s greatest fear is big turnout in mostly ignored rural areas for McCain and not enough of a turnout, not a big enough turnout in these urban areas and in the inner suburbs.  Now, this article talks about North Carolina and Missouri, but I have to assume the McCain people think the same scenario could play out in Pennsylvania, ’cause they’re there.  They have been there for the last week.  It also has a large population in rural and small towns, and it was in this state’s primary that Obama made his bitter clinger remarks at the billionaire fundraiser out in San Francisco.  Look, folks, the thing to keep in mind here is that these reports that we’re getting from inside the Obama campaign…

Yeah, and Murtha’s, Murtha’s asked for a million-dollar campaign donation.  He’s in trouble.  Jack Murtha’s in trouble in his “racist” “redneck” district, quote Jack Murtha, unquote, near Johnstown.  He’s in trouble.  There’s a lot going on here that the Drive-Bys are not reporting because they’ve been swept up in all that we have learned here from the inside Obama campaign that the entire campaign has been to create an illusion. The entire campaign has been to create an illusion — starting with skewing pollsters and co-opting the Drive-By Media — to make it look like this is a fait accompli from the get-go.  And this is why in the past week to ten days, I’ve made the point repeatedly here, not to fall prey to what you see on television and read in the dwindling editions of newspapers that are out there.

Bottom line: Ignore the polls. Ignore the exit polling on election night. Ignore the Obamaniacs’ attempts to make you think the election is over. It’s not over until you vote.

Wink, Wink

And now a nudge from Team Sarah.

Meanwhile, Obama says that if you’re against higher taxes you’re selfish. Well, to me being selfish is a virtue, but I doubt he sees it that way, and neither do most people when they hear the word.

Which is why, pace the tortured parsing of Obama’s supporters, this is a good ad:

I Repent

For years I have complained that not once in my life have I been able to vote for president. I’ve always voted against someone. (Yes, to be honest, I wasn’t even voting for Reagan. Do you remember the clowns who ran against him?)

I hereby repent of that attitude, buoyed by the late, great Robert Heinlein:

“If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for … but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.”

Update:

Instapundit just posted another Heinlein quote. Again, it’s a keeper.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”