(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

Congratulations to Coach Mike Leach and his Texas Tech Red Raiders on their last-second come-back win over the No. 1-ranked Texas Longhorns by a score of 39 to 33. Tonight they were the better team, and Leach and his staff out-coached Mac Brown and his. This is probably the greatest win in the history of the Tech football program, and now their challenge — in which I wish them the very best — will be to prove that they're more than just spoilers.

— Beldar

In light of Obama's recent comment slapping McCain for daring to challenge redistribution, I thought I would repost this quote.  Pursuing self-interest is good.  Discouraging the pursuit is unwise.

As Adam Smith described:

    "Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer employment which is most advantageous to the society . . . . [H]e intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." -- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, bk. IV, ch. 2, 397, 399 (D.D. Raphael ed., 1991) (1776).

The point is that by acting in our own self-interest, society is advanced.  But if investment and production are stymied by "spreading the wealth", society loses.

And take a listen to Milton Friedman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

This says much, much more about MSM than it does about Barack Obama.

Within a day of Sarah Palin's nomination we knew everything about her ex-brother-in-law.

Two years into his campaign, with only 72 hours before the election, we learn about Obama's aunt.

I didn't think it was possible to have a better exhibit in the illustration of the collapse of MSM credibility than the Los Angeles Times' suppression of Barack Obama's 2003 speech in praise of Rashid Khalidi, but this is at least its equal.

UPDATE: Now that you put it that way, perhaps this will have an impact on some voters.  From the e-mail:

So let me get this straight. Millionaire Obama doesn't use his wealth to help his poor illegal alien Aunt get out of public housing, but if I complain about Obama wanting to raise my taxes to 'spread the wealth around' I'm the selfish one?

Mark Steyn's typically brilliant analysis of the Obama movement has to be read a couple of times to appreciate its genius.  (HT: RobinsonandLong.com)

There are signs that millions of Americans already understand the giant "bait-and-switch" that is the Obama campaign, and that Obama's own "spread the wealth" and "fundamentally transform America" rhetoric is what has given McCain a second chance. 

One of many key graphs:

The two-dimensional idea of President Obama is seductive: To elect a young black man of Kenyan extraction and Indonesian upbringing offers redemption both for America’s original sin (slavery) and for the more recent perceived sins of President Bush — his supposed enthusiasm for sticking it to foreigners generally, and the Muslim world in particular. And no, I’m not saying he’s Muslim. It’s worse than that: He’s a pasty-faced European — at least in his view of state power, welfare, and taxation.

Steyn assumes you know, and regular readers of Steyn will know, that the "European-way" has failed on almost every count, and dramatically so.  No other politician bringing Obama's rhetoric and record would get close to 1600, but Obama's political gifts and team, and his life's narrative are so compelling that he has indeed entered the weekend before the voting ahead (except in that one day of Zogby polling.)

Ahead, but not elected, because this is a weekend where the vast, vast majority of voters ask themselves what do they want for their country and their children and grandchildren?  Do they want their money back from the market downturn and how does the economy grow enough to allow that?  Can I or the country afford the sort of massive tax hikes Obama is pledged to and which his Democratic allies will only raise?

Will McCain or Obama more ably keep the terrorist threat from our shores for the next four years?

It is the time for serious reflection, and McCain is right to be optimistic about Tuesday.  On every count except image and speechifying,  McCain is the far better choice for president.  McCain is counting on the collective common sense of the American electorate.  Obama's hundreds of millions of doallars cannot obscure the fact that he's spent less than four years achieving nothing in a do-nothing Senate, has never run so much as a shift at a fast food place (except for the Annenberg Challenge which he ran with Bill Ayers) and has a long commitment to the very ideas that have driven Europe into its deep hole.

MSM has failed to sell the "its over" message, because some of the "polls" stayed close enough long enough for voters to care about the race in its closing hours and thus to continue the focus on Obama.  Steyn's summation is the best closing argument any pundit can offer.  Send it to your friends. 

The shocker of a one-point lead for McCain in the Zogby national tracking poll for Friday will energize the GOP 96 hour effort everywhere.  The Washington Post reports on the McCain-Palin effort to woo PA.

My suggestion: Send every PA voter you know an e-mail containing three links:

This one.

This one.

This one.

In fact, send the links to every small town and rural voter you know.  Pennsylvania has been the specific target of Democrats' contempt, but that contempt isn't limited by state borders.

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

When a Hard Left tax-and-spend Democrat from Chicago promises you a middle-class tax cut, you have to be awfully gullible to believe him.

When that candidate and his own team keep dropping the border-line — from $250k to $200k to $150k, and now as low as $120k — between the "rich" who won't get a tax cut and the "middle class" who supposedly will, then you have to be completely drunk with hopey-changitude to keep believing him (links in original, boldface mine):

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin charged that Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan is “so phony that it's already starting to unravel,” continuing an argument made by her running mate Sen. John McCain this week that the Obama campaign’s level for who will receive tax cuts is creeping downward.

“Now, his whole tax plan, really, it is, it's so phony that it's already starting to unravel, and we're gonna call it the way that we see it,” Palin said at an afternoon rally in York, Pa. “It seems like every few days, we're getting a new definition now of middle class, according to their plan, whose taxes he says he won't raise on the middle class.”

Palin pointed to a comment made by Obama supporter Gov. Bill Richardson in a radio interview this morning, in which the New Mexico governor cited $120,000 as the income level where Americans would receive a tax cut under Obama’s plan. 

"What Obama wants to do is he is basically looking at $120,000 and under among those that are in the middle class, and there is a tax cut for those," Richardson said. Palin pounced on the remark, adding it to Sen. John McCain’s attack earlier this week after Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden cited $150,000 as the income level where Americans would receive a tax cut.

“And just this morning, Gov. Bill Richardson, a top surrogate for the Obama campaign, he who is working so hard to get Obama elected, Richardson, said Obama's tax plan would define middle class as $120,000 a year and under,” Palin said. “So now, we're down to less than half the original income level and, just give it a little more time, and Barack Obama will be back to raising taxes on folks earning $42,000 a year. We can't let this happen.”

A spokesperson for Richardson responded that he misspoke, meaning to say that those making less than $250,000 would not see a tax increase.

Uh, yeah, Richardson "misspoke." Because, ya know, "two hundred" sounds so much like "one hundred," and, uh, "fifty" sounds so much like "twenty." (Richardson, you will recall, was the guy Pres. Clinton put in charge of securing nuclear waste, among other weighty matters, as Secretary of Energy. I've never thought he was the sharpest tool in the shed, but can anyone believe he doesn't even understand the difference between $250k and $120k?)

If Obama can't keep Biden and Richardson in line, what possible chance does he have to stand up to the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, and Harry Reid? In addition to the additional $4 trillion that Obama wants to spend, they'll have their own priorities.

The obvious truth is that Biden and Richardson can't be bothered to memorize the phoney numbers floated on the current campagn website because as insiders, they already know those numbers have no correspondence to what will actually start happening come January 2009 if Obama wins. "Changed circumstances," we'll hear then, "require changes in our plans, and after all, we campaigned on a promise to spread the wealth, didn't we?" We've seen this same farsical movie before, in 1993 after Bill Clinton ran on a platform promising a middle class tax cut, but instead pressed Congress for and got a $241 billion tax increase.

"So shut up and pay your new taxes," we'll hear. "It's patriotic."

Look, friends and neighbors, Barack Obama has already broken the biggest financial promise he's ever made, when he decided to reject the public financing he swore he'd take. Not only did he break that promise, he then proceeded to raise and spend hundreds of millions of additional dollars, including millions of dollars in illegal, untraceable contributions gathered through an internet scam based on turned-off anti-fraud software.

Now Obama, his own Veep nominee, and one of their principal campaign surrogates are all over the lot on something as simple as the financial break-point for his tax cut. They can't keep a promise or tell a straight story, but yet they insist that you must trust them with your tax dollars.

The old saying is: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." But what's the old saying for "Fool me over and over and over and over again"?

Oh yeah, I forgot: It's "Change We Can Believe In."

— Beldar

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

Given the rather startling photograph on the left, why is it that George W. Bush is not being hailed right now — triumphantly by the GOP, reluctantly by the Democrats — as a genius for definitively and dramatically solving the single most acute economic problem that was facing most Americans this past summer, when gasoline prices at the pump were topping $4 per gallon?

The answer any truthful macro-economist will give you is: George W. Bush didn't have anything much to do with that fall in gasoline prices at the pump. And neither did Congress.

The precipitous fall in gasoline prices in September and October was the result of world-wide economic forces outside either of their control and, indeed, mostly explainable even by economists only through guesswork. The simplest classical economic answers can only hint at part of the price change: worldwide demand for refined gasoline, while diminished at the margin by this summer's high prices, hasn't dropped by anything close to half, and worldwide supply, while increased at the margin by those same high prices, hasn't grown to anything close to double either. Although the cumulative long-term decisions made by governments are certainly one factor in such worldwide economic price trends over time, the role played by any government — be it in Washington or Riyadh or Caracas — in this particular pricing spasm was inconsequential over this time-frame.

Friends and neighbors, it's simply a fact that the general public and the popular press give politicians both too much credit and too much blame for both short-term and long-term economic changes. It wasn't FDR and the New Deal who ended the Great Depression, it was World War 2. It wasn't Bill Clinton who grew the gross domestic product in the 1990s and thereby swelled tax revenues to balance the budget briefly, it was the integration into the national and world economy of the information revolution most clearly symbolized by the personal computer on which you're reading this internet blog post.

I'm not saying that governments don't affect economies. They do, especially at the margin and over long periods of time. Only bad and thoroughly intrusive governmental policy applied across a wide number of variables over a period of decades could have screwed up our health care system to its current point of ridiculousness, to pick a prominent example. The current economic crisis in the housing market, to cite another example, is an acute problem — like a mutli-hundred-billion-dollar bowel inflammation — which was directly caused by well-intended but stupid government attempts to legislate away basic economic laws by pretending that people who really can't afford expensive home mortgages could actually afford them if we just tweaked the terms of their adjustable rate mortgages enough and the real estate market always kept booming. (Yes, it was a government-run Ponzi scheme.)

And really bad government — a government that taxes its most productive people and their capital at confiscatory marginal rates, for example, of the sort we had by the conclusion of the fiasco known as the Carter Administration — can really screw things up. Indeed, the single thing at which government is most effective is taking away money from law-abiding, tax-paying citizens.

So by all means, in deciding how to cast your own vote, or in discussing with undecided friends how they ought to cast theirs, factor in whatever economic concerns you may have for what they're worth. They are important.

But as you do that, just keep in mind that photograph above and to the left. And if you're unwilling to give George W. Bush and/or the Pelosi-Reid Congress credit for that dramatic drop in gas prices at the pump — and indeed they don't deserve that credit — then discount, too, the economic wonders that you expect your preferred political ticket to accomplish if elected.

Gentle readers, if we're not safe on American soil from the sort of suicide bombings that are routine in much of the middle east, it doesn't matter nearly so much what the latest LIBOR index is. If instead of the leader of the free world and its only remaining superpower, America becomes a vacation cruise ship of touchy-feely cultural relativism drifting from Kum-bay-yah recital to recital, while our enemies infiltrate us and exterminate our allies like Israel, then it doesn't matter whose health insurance legislation you think you like better.

I earnestly commend to you Fred Kagan's op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, entitled Security Should Be the Deciding Issue.

And I remind you that just like our current one, our next commander-in-chief, whoever he turns out to be, is virtually certain to get immediate and vigorous compliance with the orders he snaps off to his military adjutants, whereas those gasoline price signs and a whole lot of other important economic facts of life are mostly, at least in the short and middle terms, going to do exactly what they were already gonna do anyway.

— Beldar

Yes, it is a one day sample.

Yes it's Zogby.

But imagine what the number would be if the Los Angeles Times was a newspaper and not a press agent, if the MSM had spent as much time probing Senator Obama's tax plans as it had Joe the Plumber's tax liens, and if Obama hadn't broken his word about public financing.

When Obama declared last night that it was five days until he "fundamentally transformed" America, he let slip just as candid a moment as when he told Joe about his plans to "spread the wealth," and as when Joe Biden told us to "Mark my words." 

Never have so few phrases moved so many undecided voters. 

Will it be enough?  Pennsylvania?  Ohio? New Hampshire?  Every middle class voter who wants their money back and growth to return?

For some weekend reading,try my new Townhall.com column on what Ayers, Rezko, Phleger and Wright might be thinking these days.

The song of the week at www.amaze.fm.

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

J-Pod has 10 Reasons Why McCain Might Win, and it's a nice list, worth a glance at least.

With due respect to him, however, I have a better list. It has precisely one item on it:

1. We haven't had the election yet. So anyone who tells you — based on public opinion polls or science or guesswork or magic or anything else — that he or she knows what the outcome is going to be is lying to you.

Throughout this weekend and all day on Monday, there will be zillions of words communicated — spoken, read, printed, downloaded, whatever — about the result of the upcoming election. Every one of them is nothing better than a guess. We've seen in past elections that notwithstanding the best modern polling techniques, all sorts of polls — including "exit polls" on the very day of the election — have been badly off.

I am not one of those who argues every four years that "This year's election is the most important ever!" I don't know whether that will turn out to be true or not. I am confident, however, that there has never been an election remotely like this one. And you know that too, if you'll just take a snapshot poll of your own common sense.

Treat your own vote as if it might decide the election. Encourage your friends to do that too. Take responsibility. And don't let someone else — anyone else, and especially not some smug know-it-all newspaper or TV reporter, or three-quarter-in-the-bag pollster — persuade you to waste or squander the most precious aspect of your heritage as an American.

— Beldar

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

Some will view this as another chance to vote against Barack Obama.

As for me, though, it's a chance to express some solidarity with Bill Kristol as another early and steadfast Sarah Palin supporter. (H/t John McCormack at the Weekly Standard Blog.)

— Beldar

I really don't know how anyone can vote for Franken given that this is just the latest of a long line of deeply embarassing epidsodes for Minnesota's most famous tax-evading failed talk show host::




Send Norm Coleman a last contribution as a rebuke to Franken's entire approach to politics and humor.

Kathryn Jean Lopez sums up the case against Franken.

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

I'm a fan of the art of the backhanded complement. Giving someone praise subtly and indirectly can be more effective.

I am not a fan, however, of the backhanded condemnation, of which the Washington Post's editorialists today provide us with a superb and absurd example in the course of a spirited defense of Rashid Khalidi (boldface mine):

In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him "a PLO spokesman"; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers — a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance — was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don't agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn't, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis — or even to Mr. Ayers — is a vile smear.

At last! At last the Washington Post recognizes — backhandedly — that today's Bill Ayers, and not just the Bill Ayers of the 1960s and 1970s, is such a twisted dollop of evil scum that comparing a mere terrorist sympathizer to him is a "vile smear" of the sympathizer!

But "terrorist sympathizer" Khalidi has indeed been, by anyone's most charitable definition. And one may make a reasonable case that he's been a terrorist enabler as well, in the sense of providing encouragement, advice, intellectual support, and a fig-leaf of social legitimacy to murderous thugs like Yassir Arafat.

The Washington Post's editors are entitled to their own opinion of Khalidi. What they are not entitled to, however, is to chide John McCain or Sarah Palin — or you or me — for wanting the American public to be given access to the best actual evidence of what was said at this dinner attended by Ayers, Khalidi, and would-be POTUS Barack Obama.

The WaPo concedes that "[i]t's fair to question why Mr. Obama felt as comfortable as he apparently did during his Chicago days in the company of men whose views diverge sharply from what the presidential candidate espouses." Yet the WaPo's editors are eager to reach a conclusive judgment on the unimportance of this tape without ever having watched it.

The WaPo insists — with no basis more solid than hope — that Sen. Obama "is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position." But others of us, including many supporters of Israel and some substantial number of as-yet-undecided American voters, distrust what Sen. Obama says is his position, and we may well interpret his placid silence when confronted with those outrages as tacit approval. Some of us who are less phlegmatic by nature than Sen. Obama may find ourselves offended and, indeed, outraged by what was said at that dinner.

Given what the WaPo editors admit — which is that "Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging" even when he's speaking on the record for international distribution — it's not at all hard to imagine that he or his good friends may have said very vile things indeed at this dinner. And some of them may well be so vile that they actually might deter someone previously inclined to vote for Obama from doing so.

What's on this tape may move tens of thousands of votes in a battleground state like Florida. A national election might hang in the balance. Can we imagine Ben Bradlee, Carl Bernstein, and Bob Woodward being equally complacent, willing to place their full reliance on someone else, when it came to reviewing the Nixon White House tapes?

As for the WaPo defending the Los Angeles' Times' journalistic ethics: No promise should ever have been made to the LAT's source that the tape wouldn't be shown. Indeed, it was the making of that promise by the LAT's reporter which was the unethical act: Journalists aren't ethically free to bargain with their sources about what news they will and won't report. Doubling down on an unethical act by blind enforcement of that promise isn't ethical behavior, it's compounding the original sin. And in any event, given that the LAT has already reported that a tape was made, and that they have it, and some of what's on it, no promise of confidentiality to the LAT's source can possibly be impaired by the LAT releasing at least (a) an audio version of the entire tape and (b) a transcript.

Whatever else it may become known for in history, this election will surely top any predecessor in cosmic irony: The Washington Post has morphed from a righteous instrument through which truth is exposed into a besotted apologist for another paper's transparent and unethical cover-up, so that they may jointly save the bacon of their mutually preferred candidate (who once again can't quite seem to "close the deal" on his own). Instead of telling truths, the Post's editors savage and ridicule those like Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin for merely asking that the truth be exposed — so that the American public can decide for itself the significance of that truth. Their editorial finishes with this snide comment:

We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that "I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over." That's good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign's increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.

Alas, the only "wind" here is the flatulence escaping from the corpse of American journalism, a once-great institution, now eagerly turned great prostitute, that has bled out all its credibility while scrambling after a basket of Obama hopey-changiness.

— Beldar

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar)

Over at NRO's The Corner, Ed Whelan argues that in a televised interview yesterday with NBC News' Brian Williams, Sen. Barack Obama was "lying" when he claimed that differing judicial philosophies would only matter "less than one percent of real hard cases."

I've listened very carefully to the video clip — preparing my own transcription from it, which I reproduce just below, but you can also compare the Chicago Tribune's version if you'd like — and I can anticipate how the Obama campaign would respond to Ed's charge. I'm less certain than Ed that Obama was deliberately lying, but I'm certainly convinced that what Obama said was badly misleading.

Read More...

Yes.  It is a long shot of course, (Intrade ticked a couple of points in McCain's direction the past two days and it is still 83-17 Obama), a long but not impossible shot. 

Here are the Rasmussen numbers.  Here's Battleground.

McCain needs the undecideds to break for him decisively, and that's what worries some Democrats. (Here's an article on who the undecideds are.)

They should be worried, especially in Pennsylvania, where the contempt for the Keystone State's suburban and rural voters has been on periodic display from Obama and Democratic icon Jack Murtha for months.

The attempt to demoralize the GOP through the gigged polling and the triumphalism of Obama hasn't worked as the counter-theme of the volatility of the polls and the overwhelming bias of the MSM --now cemented in beyond argument by the Los Angeles Times' censorship of the Obama-Khalidi (and Ayers?) video-- has kept McCain's supporters focused on the 96 hour effort to turn out voters.  Having just returned from three key states --Colorado, Minnesota and Ohio-- I know from first hand experience that the McCain effort is well staffed and very enthusiastic.  The effort to set up "exit polls" as decisive is already being blunted and though we will be treated to the standard "massive turnout" and "Obama wave" stories on CNN election day, the GOP is poised to get its people to the polls, and to ignore the effort to stomp on turnout as MSM's early and erroneous call of Florida for Gore did in 2000.

(See, btw, Geraghty's explanation of why exit polls are guaranteed to skew Obama.  HT: RobinsonandLong.com.)

The question is whether the real doubts over Obama's experience and judgment will prevail over the standard Americanimpulse to roll the dice.  Great Britain's The Economist counsels that "America should take a chance," and does so after a great speculative bubble has triggered a massive financial crisis.  The Wall Street Journal by contrast reminds us of Obama's deep roots in a Chicago machine under investigation and Sean Hannity's reported last night on Obama colleague Bill Ayer's 1974 book dedicated to "all political prisoners" in the U.S. --including by name Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan!  The reasons to entertain doubt go far beyond Ayers-Khalidi-Rezko-Wright-Acorn and they came from Joe Biden, as Senator McCain noted in my interview with him yesterday.  The Economist wants us to gamble on Obama's ability to handle the most serious of crises, but Biden has warned us we won't like what we get from Obama.

Mark his words. Mark his words.

The only thing now is to work to get the vote out, especially in the east coast states where any early sign of Obama strength will be manipulated by MSM on Tuesday night in an attempt to crush GOP turnout out west. 

Do you part especially in PA.  Think of anyone you know in the state and send them a link to Perry Nunley's Redneck Date from www.amaze.fm along with a note telling them that given the Obama/Murtha view of Pennsylvania, they should enjoy the song very much.