DebateGate

From Brass's link:

The Democratic governor has said he expects to make a decision on the state's next senator in weeks.

My 18 year old daughter introduced me to this series last summer, and I read through them all.  I was impressed with the fact that the books didn't have any cussing or sex in them.  And with a daughter who is more comfortable holding a video game controller or cell phone in her hand than a book, finding an author who could compel her to actually sit and read was impressive.

Anna has seen the movie 5 times now, with different friends, and she wants to take me to see it.  She didn't think the movie did the book justice, but she enjoyed it.  I found it interesting that the author is a Mormon, and I certainly admire her ability to develop the teenage characters in her books realistically enough to hold the attention of kids without making them seem like the 'goody two-shoe' types'. 

The books do have an underlying message. The main character falls for a classmate who belongs to a family of vampires who have trained themselves not to hunt humans, but animals instead.  There's a lot of emphasis on their struggle to overcome their natural instincts as well as their alienation from the other vampires throughout the world.  It demonstrates how hard it can be to choose to be different from others, and how overcoming the temptation to do something you've been taught is wrong can make you feel good about yourself, and that's certainly a message that today's kids need to hear.

Me, too.  And I had no idea she had so much power.

By Mark Hemingway

Everyone scoffed at the idea that a man named Hussein was running for president. While Barack Obama has an unusual name by any historical or conventionally American aesthetic standards, it has turned out to be an asset. By the time his successful campaign had ended, his supporters in the media and elsewhere had embraced its distinctiveness and lexical malleability fully and completely.

First there was Obamamania. And the media declared it good. Now that the senator from Illinois is our president-elect, we have to ask the question: What comes after Obamamania? And we don?t mean what does he stand for. That would require responsible, objective journalism.

No, the real question is: What other neologisms await the American public in the upcoming Obama administration?

The Associated Press has already produced a helpful glossary of terms including Obamaphoria, Obamalujah, Obamalicious, Barackstar and Bamelot. No doubt Ambrose Bierce is doing about 75 rpms in his grave. Your humble correspondent?s favorite selection from the Associated Press was the following:

    OBAMASCOPE: Media scrutiny of the new leader. (Example: ?One hundred days after Barack Obama took office, newspaper editors put the president?s economic plan under the Obamascope.?)

This is coming from the same news organization that wrote two days after Obama was elected, ?Even after nearly two years in the spotlight, little is understood about the 47-year-old first-term senator?s approach to leadership. His resume: community organizer, eight years as state legislator, and less than four as U.S. senator. . . . Personally, he?s a bit of an enigma, too.?

It?s a tough business climate for news organizations, and so when the AP ? which has always been a wire service ? wrote of media scrutiny of Obama, we were pleased to discover that they had diversified into the realm of joke writing:

Q: What do you see when you look through the Obamascope?
A: Whatever you want to see!

Still, even though the media is cranking out Obama-related neologisms at roughly the same rate their industry is shedding jobs, there?s still something undeniably awkward about the practice.

For instance, what is an Obama follower? (We need something broader than the current ?producer for MSNBC.?) So, in the interests of helping you, dear reader, we are going to offer the best terms for those swept up by Obamamania. Obama-philes? Too dirty. Obamanauts? They?re spacey. Obama-ists? Sounds like something from PCU.

All too awkward. Let?s move on. What are we going to call a President Obama?s opponents?

Anti-Obama-ite - Not bad. No doubt, these beknighted individuals will be the source for the unfortunate ?Yo?, Obama? jokes that will hammer the Administration for all four years.

What about adjectives?

Obamean? Messes up the spelling.

Barackean? Cumbersome.

Barackite? Weren?t they smote in the Old Testament with the jawbone of an ass or something?

The media persists in contorting the president-elect?s name to suit their purposes, so it should come as no surprise that Obama?s opponents have begun to develop a lexicon of their own. Here are a few entries:

Obamedia - Interchangeable with MSM.

O-basm - The climactic paragraph or statement in the standard media coverage. (Some might vote for The Big O.)

Obasequious - The standard journalistic position when covering Obama.

Obama Sesame - The gaping yaw of discretion shown by Obama after high-level meetings with sitting presidents.

Obamaganda - Styrofoam columns, fake presidential seal, even placards of imaginary ?Offices? of the President Elect and the other narcissistic accoutrements that seem to pop up around Obama wherever he goes.

Obamomatopoeia - The sound of mindlessly repeating phrases such as ?Yes We Can? and words like ?hope? and ?change? until they are sounds that bear no relation to the words they approximate.

O-blah-ma - The white noise of rhetorical overkill that accompanies one of his speeches. He?s promising to make the oceans recede, and yet all anyone can hear is a voice not unlike the adults in Peanuts holiday specials saying ?O-blah-ma, O-blah-ma.?

Finally, we seem to be forgetting to ask what Barack Obama really stands for. What are the policies behind his slogans and speechifying? The media has seized on Obamanomics.

That?s one term we definitely can?t use. Simply too unwieldy. Obamanomics doesn?t work for the hippest, youngest, freshest candidate and his economic theories. We suggest sticking with ?socialist.? Other appropriate policy terms may include:

Between Barack and a hard place - the precise location of America?s foreign policy interests for the next four to eight years.

Obamahol - The candidate?s proposed alternative energy source. It has enough energy density to replace hydrocarbons, deliver 5 million green-collar jobs and save the U.S. auto industry. The exact formula is a closely guarded secret, but it?s believed to be comprised primarily of tofu, recycled ?Jimmy Carter in ?80? bumper stickers and unicorn flatulence.

Barackalypse - The state of the world if his policies are enacted.

Now to put these terms to use. We recommend trying your hand at the following lesson.

Exercise: Use at least eight of these new terms in a well-formed paragraph.

Sample solution: ?His inauguration speech was vintage o-blah-ma, and that ginormous statue behind him on the podium as he was being sworn in ? the one of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. holding hands ? was the most egregious piece of obamaganda we?ve seen yet. However, the obamedia is so obasequious I?m sure Olbermann?s ?special? comment on MSNBC this evening will be a hellbroth of obasms and obamomatopoeia. I can?t wait to see what these jokers have to say when he follows through on his new plan to pull us out of Iraq in three months and Al-Qaeda has us between Barack and a hard place. In the meantime, I?m hoarding all the dried meat and canned food I can get my hands on so I can ride out the coming Barackalypse.?

Food Riots, Tax Rebellions By 2012

You know, every time I see the year 2012 associated with predictions of chaos, I get a little nervous ... maybe REM was right, after all.

2012endofdays.org

I thought McCain ran an uneven campaign.

Agreed.

A fine article, and already posted. Derbyshire has it right, of course.

(Just to clarify, that last line - For more on libertarianism, check out my recommendation that libertarians take a leaf from Stalin's book - was from Derbyshire's post, not added by me.)

I doubt I'm the only Republican who is dissatisfied with the options presented by the present two-party menu, and I'd venture to say that a lot of young conservatives would be curious enough to explore what the Libertarians have to offer.  I'm wondering if we've finally reached the point where we're going to see the political arena open up enough for real gains by third party candidates.

I've been reading a lot since the election about how the Republican party needs to redefine itself; that it hasn't done a good enough job in addressing the concerns of the average voter and that it's just plain out of touch. The Republicans got smacked upside the head this time around, and the Libertarians would be crazy not to take advantage of that.  It's a perfect time for them to push hard, get their message out and start building their base for 2012. 

I agree that Palin's clothes are a silly issue, but laying out all that bread (like $500 for a jacket) in a time of recession for  clothes from fancy stores when one is supposedly trying to get the vote of some single mom trying to find $50 for groceries to make ends meet and feed her family is going to come up.

Meanwhile, here is some material from my interview with campaign manager Rick Davis:

On the clothes fiasco: ?We flew her out from Alaska to Arizona to Ohio to introduce her to the world and take control of her life. She didn?t think ?dress for the convention?, because it might have just been a nice day trip to Arizona if she didn?t click with John. Very little prep had been done and if it had, we might have gotten picked off by the press. We were under incredible scrutiny. We got her a gal from New York and we thought, ?Let?s get some clothes for her and the family.? It was a failure of management not to get better control and track of that. The right hand didn?t know what the left hand was doing, what it was worth or where it was going. No one knew how much that stuff was worth. It was more our responsibility than hers.?