How will the media portray Sarah Palin?

For the answer, just take a look at the front page of today's Oregonian (at left) -- specifically, the caption under her photo. Not corruption reformer Sarah Palin. Not mother of five Sarah Palin. Not former small-city politician Sarah Palin. Not even one-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin. But socially conservative Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

Because, you know, it's all about abortion.

Didja hear she not only wants to force rape victims to carry their babies to term, but she also thinks the women deserved to be raped and shouldn't have dressed so provocatively? (Disclaimer: No, she never said anything of the kind, but I'm certain that someone in the left-wing fever swamp has already leveled this charge at her.)

And, by the looks of things in the online world, they plan to make issue of her experience. While her experience is a bit thin, I think it's too early to make the call on that (not that the Obama campaign will wait for more clarification), and that Jonah Goldberg hit it on the head:

If she does a good job at the convention and survives about three weeks of serious media scrutiny — no horrible gaffes, no unforgivable I-don't-knows to gotchya questions (fair and unfair), no botched hostile interviews — she will emerge as the single most inspired VP pick in modern memory and she will give the Democrats migraines for a long time to come, assuming there are no terrible skeletons we don't know about. But, if she screws up in the next three weeks, gives the press and the late night comedians sufficient fodder to Quayelize her, she'll be seen as anything from a liability to an outright horrible pick. That's it.

And along those lines, they're constantly harping on the "no foreign policy experience" theme. I think (or at least, I hope) that over the next few weeks, we'll learn that this woman has given foreign policy a fair amount of thoughtful examination. And that should put her in the same league with Barack Obama's foreign policy experience.

One final thought: the venom coming from liberals over this pick tells me they're scared. In Sarah Palin, they see a strong woman who is likeable and comes across as appealing to voters. This combines one of the best qualities of Hilary Clinton (strength) with one of the best qualities of Barack Obama (likability). They're praying that Palin has some serious skeleton in her closet or that she makes some horrible gaffe, because otherwise their messiah may be un-deified.

When you're having a bad day at work...

Just read this. I have no idea if it's true -- I'm not about to try researching it! -- but it made me laugh:

On your way home from work, stop at your pharmacy and go to the thermometer section and purchase a rectal thermometer made by Johnson & Johnson. Be very sure you get this brand!

Change into very comfortable clothing and sit in your favorite chair. Open the package and remove the thermometer. Now, carefully place it on a table or a surface so that it will not become chipped or broken.

Now the fun part begins.

Take out the literature from the box and read it carefully. You will notice that in small print there is a statement: "Every Rectal Thermometer made by Johnson & Johnson is personally tested and then sanitized."

Now, close your eyes and repeat out loud five times, "I am so glad I do not work in the thermometer quality control department at Johnson & Johnson."

Have a nice day and remember, there is always someone else with a job that is more of a pain in the butt than yours!

It's Palin

Here's the official McCain press release.

Obama loves the future - it's where his accomplishments are!

David Brooks has a hilarious take on the typical convention speech heard at the Democratic National Convention this week. My favorite snippets:

We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”

One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.

We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are.

and

We heard from Joe Biden, whose 643 years in the Senate make him uniquely qualified to talk to the middle class, whose family has been riding the Acela and before that the Metroliner for generations, who has been given a lifetime ban from the quiet car and who is himself a verbal train wreck waiting to happen.

and this, too:

We were thrilled by his speech in front of the Greek columns, which were conscientiously recycled from the concert, “Yanni, Live at the Acropolis.” We were honored by his pledge, that if elected president, he will serve at least four months before running for higher office. We were moved by his campaign slogan, “Vote Obama: He’s better than you’ll ever be.” We were inspired by dozens of Democratic senators who declared their lifelong love of John McCain before denouncing him as a reactionary opportunist who would destroy the country.

No, this country cannot afford to elect John Bushmccain. Under Republican rule, locusts have stripped the land, adults wear crocs in public and M&M’s have lost their flavor. We must instead ride to the uplands of hope!

God bless America.

Heh. Just Heh.

Barack Obama, after winning election to the US Senate in November 2004:

I am a believer in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job, and I think that if I were to seriously consider running on a national ticket, I would essentially have to start now, before having served a day in the senate. Now, there’s some people who might be comfortable doing that, but I’m not one of those people.

My name is Bill, and I'm a partisan hack

That might as well be the first sentence of any press release from Bill Bradbury when he officially announces his candidacy for the Oregon governorship. He told the Oregonian on Monday that he will "likely" run for governor in 2010, but in the process he practically admitted he's as left-wing as they come.

Here are the second and third paragraphs of the O's story from Tuesday:

Bradbury, a delegate to the Democratic convention, said he will likely run for governor in 2010, particularly if the state's voters reject an initiative that would create a non-partisan primary system. Gov. Ted Kulongoski will be ending his two terms in office and cannot run again.

"It's really a slam dunk if we keep our current primary system and it's a very strong possibility if we move to a different primary system," said Bradbury, who believes he has particularly deep support among Democratic voters.

Translation:

The Blue Oregon crowd will support me because they know I share their ultra-liberal bonafides. They've seen how I've monkeyed with ballot titles and signatures for the issues we don't like, and they know they'll get more of the same partisanship if I'm the governor. And really, that's all I need to win the primary nomination under the current system. Alas, I'll have a harder time getting past the primary if those pesky independents and wrong-headed conservatives can participate, but I still think I can sneak by because there are lots of people who know my name but not my track record.

I know there are some conservatives who think a Bradbury candidacy clears the way for a reasonable conservative, but I would refer those people to the last sentence of my translation. There are many people who figure Bill Bradbury has been the secretary of state for the last eight years, so he must be OK. And, when Republicans point out his partisan tendencies, those same voters will chalk it up to more partisanship.

I'm not a supporter of the open primary idea, but this is a point in its favor.

Quote of the Day: Pelosi's theology

Today's quote of the day comes from Oregon blogger Gullyborg, regarding Nancy Pelosi's expertise on the question of when life begins:

By now you may have heard that Nancy Pelosi stuck her foot in it with some ridiculous comments about how the Catholic Church views the question "when does life begin?"

She decided that Saint Augustine pronounced life begins at three months. Even though there is no evidence to suggest he ever said or wrote this . . .

Honestly, though, the simple answer to the question, from a purely Catholic point of view, should be "conception." After all, Catholics celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, not the "feast of the immaculate second trimester."

Heh.

How sad

Former Trail Blazer Kevin Duckworth died last night in Lincoln City at the age of 44. RIP.

Palin or Pawlenty

I agree with this reasoning from Lisa Schiffren on National Review today, particularly her thoughts on Mitt Romney:

Pundits are making the wrong call when they look for the GOP vice-presidential candidate who will be best in policy in debates with Biden, or who will be a more useful attack dog. To be sure, those are important tasks. And it is true that Mitt Romney could do them very well — and that he spots Biden a bunch of I.Q. points, an education and a record of accomplishment. But can Mitt successfully empathize with the middle class for the duration of this campaign and after? He couldn't do it in the primaries. It isn't who he is.

Because Biden is essentially a mediocrity, McCain has more leeway than expected to choose someone who is not entirely prime-time ready. We are back to the two governors who are young, totally real, quintessentially middle class family guys, and, like Joe Biden, up from working class backgrounds: Sarah Palin of Alaska and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota. She is less sophisticated, but is a walking testament to American middle class pluck and achievement. And she will pull some female Democrat voters in. He is smart, good on policy, and has an excellent, first-generation-to-college, up by the bootstraps story. Because they really are middle-class Americans, middle-class American voters are far more likely to believe it when either of them express empathy and a desire to tackle the nation's economic anxieties. That will be the campaign's central issue, and there is no faking it.

Romney's money and his sometimes-robotic persona are likely to be a stumbling block in this regard and, in my opinion, his economic credentials are not sufficient to overcome those issues.

The only hesitation I would have in Schiffren's opinion about potential VP selections is regarding Pawlenty. The times I have heard him speak, my thoughts have been: solid on policy, and a great antidote to insomnia. The man is a bore, and like it or not, John McCain has to think about personality as much as he does about policy.

Why? Because Lisa Schiffren is right: one (perhaps the) central issue of the campaign will be the economy. McCain has already demonstrated with his how-many-houses-do-I-have gaffe that he's vulnerable, and he needs a likable and genuine person in the No. 2 slot to help him reach the middle class that the Democrats so want to persuade.

Gripping info on the Democrats' convention

The first thing I saw today on the home page of the Democratic National Convention?

"Podium Unveiled. See the first official look."

Oooh, ahhh.



















The podium?! Inquiring minds apparently want to know. Makes you wanna go rush out to buy a ticket to Denver, doesn't it?

Quote of the Day 2

From Jonah Goldberg on Barack Obama, noting that the Democrat should be way ahead of John McCain -- but isn't:

Ask the typical Obama supporter why this should be so and you’ll get a range of answers. Some just stare at the poll numbers the way my late basset hound would look at me when I tried to feed him a grape: with pure unblinking incomprehension. Others act like the guy who sits alone with his shopping bags at the public library, muttering about Fox News conspiracies and how Karl Rove-like aliens are doing terrible things with probes of proctological exactitude. Still others just shake their heads at the racism of anyone who could possibly have a problem with a very left-wing politician with almost no experience, who often sounds like his campaign slogan is: “People of Earth! Stop Your Bickering. I Am From Harvard, And I’m Here To Help.”

I especially liked Goldberg's observation -- via Michael Barone -- that "with the exception of the black vote, Obama’s support within the Democratic party is comprised almost entirely of cultural liberals. [Barone] dubbed this intra-Democratic split a divide between 'academics and Jacksonians.' The Jacksonians are working-class, culturally conservative whites. The academics are the same people who formed the base for Howard Dean, Bill Bradley, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart, George McGovern, and other successful presidents in the anti-matter universe where Spock has a goatee."

That sound you heard

after Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor won the beach volleyball gold medal? That was Keith Olbermann's head exploding.

What does birth control do? Park your car?

Today's quote of the day comes from the unexcelled Peggy Noonan, talking about how the country is starting to pay attention to the presidential race, and specifically about Barack Obama's abortion answer at Rick Warren's church last weekend:

As to the question when human life begins, the answer to which is above Mr. Obama's pay grade, oh, let's go on a little tear. You know why they call it birth control? Because it's meant to stop a birth from happening nine months later. We know when life begins. Everyone who ever bought a pack of condoms knows when life begins.

To put it another way, with conception something begins. What do you think it is? A car? A 1948 Buick?

Or as I said in the comments of a post a few years ago:

You think it will develop into a porcupine? A tadpole, maybe? A grapefruit? If it has the physical attributes of a baby, but it's not human, what in the world is it? And how did it get inside that woman? Quick, someone alert the authorities!

Just don't alert Barack Obama. It's above his pay grade.

Showing kids how work can be meaningful

I'm slogging through a Tony Woodlief essay this morning -- this one in the Wall Street Journal -- because I like Tony Woodlief -- but taking no joy in it as he drones on about capitalist, Christian and Marxist views on work.

And then I get to the end and Tony slams me with this:

One summer I installed stairs and flooring in our stifling-hot attic. My oldest son, 4 at the time, insisted on donning his little work belt to help. I situated him in a corner with his tiny hammer and watercolor paint, where he spent hours hammering and painting while I nailed floorboards. Months later, out of the blue, he took my hand and asked when we could do that again. Focused on the heat and the weight of those boards, I'd found the work miserable. But to my son it was blissful. We now had a "secret room." And he had worked with his daddy.

Perhaps too many children fail to value work because their parents fail to shepherd them into a world where work can be meaningful. So maybe I should just shut up and get to working with a smile on my own face. As is so often the case when raising children, the qualities we want them to possess must first be cultivated in ourselves.

How many times have I worked on something and heard a small voice from the doorway -- Daddy, can I help? -- and ignored it because it was easier? And yet, as Tony so kindly points out, that's not exactly a helpful example.

Did I say I like Tony Woodlief. I take it all back.

Today's stretch from the Oregonian

From today's Oregonian editorial on the Washington state top-two primary, which the paper is falling all over itself to bring to Oregon:

Party leaders abhor this idea, but Washington state voters clearly love it. They voted overwhelmingly to adopt the system, and in Tuesday's otherwise ho-hum primary they turned out by the biggest percentage since 1972 when the electorate was enflamed over the Vietnam War.

Washington state voters clearly love it? Well, it did pass by a nearly 60-40 margin (in 2004), but that big percentage of yesterday's vote? About a quarter of voters -- 27.3 percent.

What a ringing endorsement.

A (wee) bit of bad pub for the Newport aquarium

Courtesy of NRO's Jonah Goldberg, who is vacationing in Yachats, Ore. this week.

What really makes a leader?

My favorite internet writer, Tony Woodlief, found a book he likes. It's called Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield, and is a story of the Battle of Thermopylae that Woodlief calls "far more faithful to history than the stunning film, 300."

But what caught my eye was not Woodlief's recommendation, but his snippet of a lecture that the character Xeones gives to the Persian King about the character qualities of a real king:

A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.

And then, Woodlief ties a great quote to a great thought:

Replace king with pastor, CEO, or — dare one say it — U.S. President, and perhaps this lesson extends beyond royalty. But if we took it to heart, how many self-styled “leaders” would warrant replacement? And with whom would we replace them?

It's a thought-provoking point, so I tried to reshape the quote to apply to presidents in particular. Alas, mine is a bit more wordy than those from Pressfield via Xeones:

A president does not command the loyalty of his country by milking tragedies or exaggerating challenges. He does not purchase that loyalty by trying to create a government program for every boo-boo in society. A president earns the love of his countrymen when they see in him a genuine concern for their challenges, and when he works tirelessly with other decision-makers -- both inside and outside of government -- to find solutions without trying to score political points or make his opponents look smaller. His principles are clear and unwavering, but the solutions that fit within those principles are wide-ranging and sometimes out-of-the-political-box. When a president asks his countrymen to shoulder a burden, he first demonstrates his own sacrifices to meet that burden, and continues to sacrifice until the burden is lifted. He never forgets that he works for his country and its people, that the decisions he makes will have real impacts on his countrymen for many years to come, and that he thus has a responsibility to regularly address the reasons behind those decisions. He does not insist on blind loyalty -- either from the people immediately surrounding him or from the country at large -- but invites push-back to temper his ideas. In short, the president is elected to serve his country, and he should demonstrate service -- to family, staff, Congress, country and God -- in every action he takes.

Is that too high a bar?

Quote of the Day: Obama's certainty on abortion

From Rich Lowry:

At Saddleback, Obama said determining when a baby gets rights is “above his pay grade.” Leave aside that presidents usually have an opinion about who deserves legal rights. If Obama is willing to permit any abortions in any circumstances, he’d better possess an absolute certainty about the absolute moral nullity of the fetus.

Or as the folks at Stand to Reason like to say: If the unborn is not a human person, no justification for abortion is necessary. However, if the unborn is a human person, no justification for abortion is adequate.

Obama's been throwing people under the bus for years

In 2000, when Barack Obama was an Illinois State Senator, he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He lost -- no he was crushed -- by a 2-to-1 margin.

The lesson he apparently learned from that loss was that he should be willing to throw anyone under the bus who stood in the way of his political ambitions. There were no principles or allies, only people to use and positions to take that would get him to the next level.

The evidence of this comes from a news story that appeared on London's Channel 4 news, in which reporter Sarah Smith explains how Obama cleared out his opposition to create a deceptive narrative about transcending race. The portion below starts at the 6:19 mark of the video, and goes for almost a minute:

Rev. Wright, now disowned, was essential to Obama’s early career. Obama needed Wright because the first time he ran for nationwide office, he quickly discovered his unique background that made him so irresistible to white liberals caused distrust in the black community. He was shocked by the hostility from African-American voters when he badly lost a congressional primary eight years ago.

As Obama navigated his way through the power structures in the state senate, he managed to take advantage of boundary changes, and remapped Chicago to suit himself. Obama completely redrew the boundaries of his own state senate seat, and he included in it lots of whiter, wealthier city center areas. Out were the poorer black neighborhoods that he had represented, and into his district came many of the city’s richest and most influential political donors — the very people Obama knew he would need when he ran for the US Senate.

So Barack Obama worked the black community to seem like one of them, only to throw the black community under the bus to gain the favor of rich white folks. Then he threw Rev. Wright under the bus to gain the favor of moderates throughout the country who couldn't stomach the idea that a president would take counsel from a man who called for blacks to sing "God Damn America."

And that's not even counting Obama's entire church, his grandmother, or his positions on gun control or town-hall debates or the Iraq surge or public financing or his nifty presidential seal or state's rights regarding same-sex marriage or...

If I keep saying it wrong, maybe they'll believe it

That seems to be the Oregonian's thought pattern on the 2004 Washington governor's race. From an editorial in the paper about today's state primary election (emphasis mine):

Christine Gregoire will win a spot on the November ballot with ease, and so will Republican challenger Dino Rossi, whom she beat four years ago by a razor-thin margin that led to a series of controversial recounts.

The only trouble with that statement is that Dino Rossi won the initial ballot count. And the recount. It wasn't until King County somehow found more than 700 uncounted ballots that Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes.

How is Obama any more qualified than Thomas?

Saturday on the stage of Saddleback Community Church, Barack Obama was asked which Supreme Court justice he would not have nominated if he were president. His answer was Clarence Thomas, about whom he said:

...I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation.

This either questions Thomas' intelligence or his background (or both), so I decided to take a look at the history of Clarence Thomas. And while I was at it, I looked at the history of Barack Obama.

Clarence Thomas was born on June 23, 1948 in a tiny Georgia town. Born into poverty -- his family lived in a one-room shack with dirt floors and without plumbing -- his father left when Clarence was 2. At age 7, Clarence and his brother went to live with their grandfather, who owned a fuel oil business. They made deliveries with their grandfather, learning his ethic of hard work and self-reliance. Clarence's grandfather sent him to Catholic schools, including an all-white boarding school in nearby Savannah, where he overcame racism to play on the football team and achieve excellent grades. He was the only African-American graduate from St. John Vianny Minor Seminary in 1967.

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His parents split when Barack was 2, and he only saw his father one additional time before he died in 1982. In 1967, his mother remarried and the family moved to his stepfather's native Indonesia. Barack returned to Hawaii in 1971 and lived with his grandparents, attending Punahou Academy as one of three African-American 1979 graduates.

After high school, Clarence Thomas initially attended a Catholic seminary in Missouri, but decided against the priesthood after hearing a classmate's racist comment about Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. He moved to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., graduating cum laude in 1971 with an English degree. While at Holy Cross, he helped found the Black Student Union. After Holy Cross, he moved to New Haven, Conn., where he graduated from the Yale University Law School in 1974.

Barack Obama moved to Los Angeles after high school, attending Occidental College for two years before moving to New York. Transferring to Columbia University, he earned a degree in political science, specializing in international relations.

After Columbia, he worked for a year at the Business International Corp. and for a year at the New York Public Interest Research Group. During that time, he was also involved with two faith-based community organizations, the Developing Communities Project and the Gamaliel Foundation.

In 1988, he entered the Harvard Law School, where he was named the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated magna cum laude in 1991.

So thus far, we have two African-American men whose fathers bailed when the kids were young, who were raised by their mothers and grandparents, who received the opportunity to attend very good high schools, and who earned degrees from very good colleges. Not much difference.

But here's where it gets a little bit more difficult to compare and contrast, because while Clarence Thomas pursued barely a half-dozen opportunities leading up to his Supreme Court appointment, Barack Obama (as we saw prior to his time at Harvard) was much more diversified in his pursuits.

And it's also the point where you see two African-American men go in different directions as it relates to their attitudes toward race. One man disavowed racial preferences, even though he benefited from them in a variety of ways; the other man served in positions (both paid and unpaid) in which his race was a key motivating factor.

After earning his law degree, Clarence Thomas interviewed with various law firms, but as in college, he felt he was treated differently because of his race. (One biography called it "resentment toward the tokenism of affirmative action, [which] combined with his grandfather's lessons on self-sufficiency and independence, had moved Thomas into a circle of African American conservatives who rejected the dependency fostered among blacks by the welfare state.") He instead moved to Missouri to work as an assistant attorney general under John Danforth.

When Danforth was elected to the United States Senate in 1977, Thomas moved to St. Louis to work as a corporate attorney at the Monsanto Corp. Two years later, he moved to Washington to work as a legislative assistant to Danforth -- but only on the condition that he not work on civil rights issues.

And yet, his lack of desire for facing racial issues still led him to positions that dealt directly and specifically with those issues. In 1981, the Reagan Administration tapped Thomas as the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, a post he held until he was promoted in 1982 to the chairmanship of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In those positions, he insisted that minorities should succeed on their merits, not on the backs of programs like affirmative action.

He worked at the EEOC until 1990, when President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Less than 16 months later, Bush nominated him to fill the Supreme Court seat vacated by retiring African-American justice Thurgood Marshall. The irony could not have been lost on Thomas that his nomination was based, at least in part, on his race. As another biography said, "Although President George Bush stated that he chose Thomas for his legal qualifications, it would take conscious effort to ignore the political pressures on Bush to name a black candidate after the retirement of Thurgood Marshall, the Court's first and only black justice."

When Thomas was sworn in to his seat on the Supreme Court, he was 43 years and four month old.

After Harvard, Barack Obama went in a multitude of directions. He was the director of Illinois Project Vote, which registered African-American voters for the 1992 election. He also began a four-year stint as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School (followed by an eight-year stint as a senior lecturer). In 1993, he accepted an Associate position with Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development. He served Of Counsel at the firm from 1996 to 2004, although his law license went inactive in 2002.

Between 1992 and 2002, he was also on the boards of directors for several groups that focused on civil rights, minority empowerment and economic justice: Public Allies, the Woods Fund of Chicago, the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, and the Lugenia Burns Hope Center.

Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996, gaining reelection in both 1998 and 2002. In 2004, he was elected to the United States Senate. Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States a little more than two years later.

If he is elected president, his age on election day will be 47 years, three months.

So with Clarence Thomas, you have a man who earned degrees from two of the nation's finest universities, Holy Cross and Yale. (Say what you want about how he got in, but affirmative action doesn't earn you the grades you need to qualify, nor does it earn you the grades you need to receive the diploma.) He then worked for two years in state government, two years in the private sector, two years in the U.S. Capitol, 10 years dealing with civil and employment rights from a government perspective, and almost two years in the federal judiciary.

That set of experiences is what he brought to the Supreme Court.

With Barack Obama, you have a man who earned degrees from two of the nation's finest universities, Columbia and Harvard. Then in overlapping fashion, he worked for 11 years in the private sector, 12 years in academia, and 10 years with various community organizations, along with eight years in state government and three in the federal government.

Those are the experiences he brings with him in his quest for the presidency.

So here's my question: According to Obama, Clarence Thomas' education and (almost) two decades of experience -- including a variety of government roles and personal challenges -- failed to make him a "strong enough jurist or legal thinker" to qualify as one of nine Supreme Court justices. So why is Barack Obama -- with the same education and (almost) two decades of experience in various government roles and personal challenges -- a strong enough leader to become the one-and-only president of the greatest nation on the planet?

Never mind the mainstream, he's on the extreme fringe

Who said this?

When a child is born, they deserve every protection that the country can provide them.

I'll give you a hint: the speaker is talking about abortion.

Here, I'll give you multiple choice. Was it:

a) Barack Obama
b) John McCain
c) Kate Michelman
d) James Dobson
e) None of the above

Give up? The answer is (e). The speaker was actually an executive for NARAL Pro-Choice America, stating that her organization did not oppose keeping a baby alive once it's born, regardless of how or when that birth occurs. (Nice of them, isn't it?)

What she was talking about was the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA), which passed in 2002 and says that a child who is born "at any stage of development" and who is still living after that birth (no matter if the birth occurred from labor or induced abortion), has all the rights afforded to any other person. It also made a point to say these rights did not apply to a child prior to his or her birth, lest the pro-abortion folks have a meltdown.

And because it stipulated that those rights did not apply prior to birth, NARAL did not oppose the bill.

But Barack Obama did. Mr. Obama holds the opinion that if a mom wants to abort her child and the child somehow survives the abortion attempt, that child has no right to medical care to keep it alive.

Oh, Mr. Obama will tell you otherwise -- that the Illinois version of the BAIPA he opposed was different than the federal law because it would have outlawed all abortions -- but he's, um, mis-remembering. Mr. Obama was chairman of the Health & Human Services Committee when he voted against an amendment that contained language identical to the federal bill passed a year earlier. So because NARAL Pro-Choice America didn't oppose the bill when Mr. Obama did, that places Mr. Obama on the extreme political fringe -- never mind outside the mainstream -- compared to NARAL, one of the most stringent pro-abortion organizations in the country.

In fact, it seems Barack Obama is in favor of allowing a doctor to pull a living baby out until just the head is outside its mother, stab it in the back of the head with a sharp object and create a hole large enough to suck the brains out. After all, Mr. Obama has promised that one of his top priorities as president would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would erase every federal and state restriction on abortion. That means re-legalizing partial birth abortion, which I described above; making sure your 13-year-old daughter could abort her baby without having to tell you a thing; and ensuring that no community could say their tax dollars shouldn't pay for it.

Change we can believe in? That apparently doesn't apply if you're a fetus.

Who knew that Barack Obama was an Oregon Duck fan?

Here's the evidence.

A good reminder on bravery

From Brian at A Boy Named Sous, regarding the Oregonians who lost their lives in a helicopter while fighting those California wildfires.

Well said, Brian.

But if you stand, it's OK

Funny typo of the day from the Oregonian's home page this morning:

Prostrate testing downplayed

You can see it at the bottom of this screen capture, circled in red.

Who'da thunk it? I agree with Paris Hilton

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

Tuesday contrarian takes

Contrarian Take #1: If Gordon Smith has no better issues to tackle in a campaign ad than Jeff Merkley's office furniture, he deserves to lose. That is a lame ad, and a lame issue.

Contrarian Take #2: I have no dog in this fight, knowing nothing about the candidates. That said, those people who are making an issue out of Gresham Police Chief Carla Piluso wearing her police uniform in an ad for the Multnomah County Commission race need to get a hobby -- needlepoint, bocce ball, something. Because this complaint is a sure indication of people with too much time on their hands. She's the chief of police, for goodness sake! Get a life, people.

Even if we had to pay $10 for a gallon of gas...

...the Democratic Party wouldn't agree to deep-sea oil drilling.

But they're fighting for the little guy.

For parents who have tried a restaurant with their kids

The reason old couples sit in restaurants and don't say a word? Tony Woodlief says it's because of decades of cacophony from their children:

It's because they are all talked out. Just watch them. They don't even speak to the waitress; they just point to what they want on the menu. I imagine once the last boy is out of the house we may go for a good solid year without saying a word. And it will be blissful. Then we'll spend the rest of our days wondering why they don't come visit more often.

But that's okay, because we'll visit them. Mostly because we love them. But also to watch them eat with their own children. Heh heh heh.

Read the whole thing. It's good for a laugh.

This is the one we have waited for...

I was listening to a Chris Tomlin song yesterday called "This is our God." The chorus goes like this:

This is the one we have waited for
This is the one we have waited for
This is the one we have waited for
Jesus, Lord and Savior
This is our God

For a moment, I forgot who I was listening to and thought it was a song about Barack Obama.