Obama Snubs Kansas City Mayor

Mayor Funkhouser, who has been harshly criticized by liberal groups (because of his defense of embattled Minuteman member, Frances Semler) was not allowed on stage during Obama’s speech Tuesday night at Municipal Auditorium.

Instead he stood in the background.

“I wasn’t invited to be on stage,” said Mayor Funkhouser. “But, why would I care? I’m not remotely interested in being on stage and trying to be in the celebrity part of this thing.”

The mayor doesn’t believe he was snubbed, but Kansas City Star political reporter Dave Helling does.

“I don’t think people at the presidential level are worried about the kryptonite from Mark Funkhouser,” Helling says. “But, in any campaign, you don’t want to have to fight the fights you don’t have to fight.”

Funkhouser is fighting harsh criticism and opponents who are demanding a recall election.

“I don’t see myself as political kryptonite,” said Funkhouser.

The mayor believes he was excluded because his political star just isn’t bright enough yet.

“We’re not in the same class,” said Funkhouser. “They’re 747’s. I’m a piper.”

With all due respect….I think Funkhouser is trying to play this down. When a major candidate for POTUS from your own party visits your town, and you are the Mayor of that town…you should expect to be invited on stage during the big speech.

Funkhouser refuses to endorse Obama or any other candidate. The mayor doesn’t want to make any more political enemies.

I daresay.

Obama Voted Mr. Congeniality And Most Liberal…But Mostly Most Liberal

Apologies to Ace for that.

This is red meat for Republicans if he winds up being the nominee:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal’s 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate.

Allahpundit surmises that this is why we get ‘10 parts gassy “change” to every one part specific policy proposals’.

Another Stunningly Scandalous Clinton Donation

The New York Times has the story:

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

More at The New York Times if your stomach can take it.

Most likely this will be swept under the rug like all the rest.

More about Frank Giustra, here.

Hat tip: Lucianne

That Pain McCain Is Driving Us Insane

And we’re about to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. Not too long ago, Hillary was looking like an inevitable “sure thing”. But the Clintons’ floundering and dirty politics has managed to sully both Democratic candidates, offering the Republicans a gift we seem loath to accept.

No, he not perfect. No, he doesn’t seem terribly conservative. Yet somehow he’s managed to acquire an 82% career ranking by the American Conservative Union.

Victor Davis Hansen offers these words of wisdom:

In reaction to McCain’s own surge and the Republican windfall, the conservative base went ballistic. Soon a Republican civil war broke out over how best to lose the election.

Despite McCain’s 82-percent career ranking by the American Conservative Union, and his support for balanced budgets, an end to pork-barrel spending and earmarks, strong support for the war, and expressed regret over once supporting the Bush illegal immigration reform package, McCain was branded by the conservative media as a sellout and a near liberal. Not to mention that he was supposedly too old and hot-tempered to be the Republican nominee. The more McCain was discovered not to be a perfect conservative, the more he was accused of not even being a good one.

Even stranger, the various Republican candidates began invoking Ronald Reagan’s three-decade-old tenure as the new litmus test of the times — apparently to show how moderates like the wayward McCain fell far short of the Gipper’s true-blue conservatism.

Were conservatives supposed to forget that a maverick Reagan raised some taxes, signed an illegal-alien amnesty bill, expanded government, appointed centrist Supreme Court justices, advocated nuclear disarmament, sold arms to Iran, and pulled out of Lebanon — but to remember only that John McCain was not for the original Bush tax cuts or once supported the administration’s offer of a quasi-amnesty?

I’m all for pointing out the differences in the candidates, and attacking a candidate on the points you strongly disagree with. That’s politics.

But this…”I’m staying home”, or worse, “I’m voting for Obama if he’s the nominee” bullshit has got to stop.

If you think our country can survive the foreign policy decisions of a liberal Democrat Commander In Chief at this critical juncture, then I want to know what you’re smoking.

There is still a war on terror going on. That should be the primary consideration for any serious Republican.

And we all know where McCain stands on the war.

I put my country above my party.

Petre And The Bear

 A seven year old Romanian boy, with the help of his three legged dog, a stick, and -  I’m thinking - one hell of an adrenaline rush,  fought off a 280 pound bear that was attacking his mother:

When the bear appeared, Petre Prundaru ran off and hid behind a tree, but his mother, Anisoara, 40, slipped and fell. When the boy saw the bear grab her by the neck, he picked up a stick and charged it.

His pet dog, Cotonogu, also went for the bear and the animal ran off.

Petre then managed to find a shepherd, who called emergency services. His mother was taken to hospital, where she was treated for cuts.

A hospital spokesman said, most people who get that close to a bear, don’t live to tell the tale.

She (Petre’s mother) said: “We were gathering sticks for firewood when suddenly our little dog, Cotonogu, started to growl, and then out of the bushes came this enormous bear. I stepped backwards and tripped over and shouted at Petre to run.

“Then the bear came and started sniffing me and scratching and biting me. I couldn’t move – I was terrified – and then it opened its mouth and put it round my throat.

“I could feel its breath and its teeth and then I heard Petre and my dog shouting and barking, and the bear was gone. I can’t believe I survived.”

I liked the first comment at the Scotsman’s  website:

 Brave wee laddie and his dog….she is one lucky woman….

Aye.

Goracle Endorses…..Gay Marriage

Out of the blue, God only knows why, Al Gore has come out with a video that strongly endorses gay marriage.

Not exactly the endorsement Obama was hoping for.

Most Americans, of course disapprove of gay marriage, while supporting civil unions, which puts the Democratic candidates in an awkward position:

It pushes the Democratic establishment that much closer to a position he now shares with Eliot Spitzer and some other leading Dems, and is prompting a bit of grumbling in gay political circles that this batch of candidates aren’t quite there.”Gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women — to make contracts, to have hospital visiting rights, to join together in marriage, and I don’t understand why it is considered by some people to be a threat to heterosexual marriage,” he says on the video, which appears on his Current TV network. “Shouldn’t we be promoting the kind of faithfulness and loyalty to ones partner regardless of sexual orientation?”

Hillary and Obama say, er…thanks a lot, Al…great timing!

Gore’s video can be seen at The Politico.

In other good news for Democrats…Ralph Nader is considering throwing his hat into the ring!

Ralph Nader has formed a presidential exploratory committee, and said in an interview Wednesday that he will launch another presidential bid if he’s convinced he can raise enough money to appear on the vast majority of state ballots this fall.

I wonder if he’ll be running in his worn out shoes.

Wednesday’s Hero: Staff Sgt. Justin R. Whiting

SSgt. Justing R. Whiting
27 years old from Hancock, New York
3rd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne)
January 19, 2008                       

Staff Sgt. Justin R. Whiting, a Special Forces medical sergeant sustained fatal wounds when his vehicle was struck by an improvised explosive devise 16 kilometers south of Mosul, Iraq.

He is survived by his mother, Estelline, of Colorado Springs, Colo., father, Randall, of Hancock, N.Y., sister, Amanda, of DuPont, Wash., and brother Nathan of Dover, Tenn.

For more information on SSgt. Justin Whiting, you can download this PDF file.

These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived.

By:Indian Chris

Voter Fraud In MO. Already

The Democrats can shout “Voter disenfranchisement” all they want, but the dead are still not allowed to vote in America.

The St. Louis Election Board discovered that a woman dead since October cast an absentee ballot in the city presidential primary, an official said.

The case is being turned over today to the Department of Justice, said Scott Leiendecker, the Republican director for the St. Louis Election Board.

Leiendecker said officials at the election board believe that the woman’s son cast the ballot by purporting that his mother signed with an “X” and then he signed as a witness. Leiendecker would not divulge the name of the woman or her son.

Leiendecker said that the alleged fraudulent ballot was just one of the 2,000 absentee ballots already cast in the city.

Leiendecker said that with just one such case — and that it was caught right away by election workers — shows that the city’s system to catch voter fraud is working.

I’m glad Leiendecker is on high alert. He needs to be with groups like ACORN out there, collecting mass quantities of fraudulent voter registration cards. This will be a huge issue for Republicans everywhere in November.

Back in March of 2007, The Competitive Enterprise Institute reported on the St. Louis case:

St. Louis election officials received so many fraudulent voter registration cards from ACORN that they sent letters to 5,000 registrants, asking the recipients to contact them, John Fund reported in the Wall Street Journal. Fewer than 40 of the suspect registrants responded.

ACORN activists may have committed election fraud. In Missouri, ACORN and its union allies credit the minimum-wage issue with helping put Democrat Claire McCaskill over the top in her challenge to Republican incumbent Sen. Jim Talent. ACORN’s actions have raised eyebrows—and produced federal indictments.

St. Louis recently indicted 11 different people on voter fraud, according to Leiendecker.
Hat tip: Crime Scene KC

Flight 93 Memorial Blogburst #16

The crescent-topped tower

Not all of the Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial is hidden. One of the things that Tom Burnett Sr. protested from the beginning was the overtly minaret-like Tower of Voices. The Tower is formed in the shape of an extruded crescent, and even has its top cut at an angle so that its crescent arms reach up into the sky, similar to the upturned crescent motif seen atop minarets all over the world:

Up tower view (left) shows the Tower of Voices to be formed in the shape of an Islamic crescent, covering about 2/3rds of a circle of arc, with a circular inner arc. The top of the tower is cut at an angle (right) so that the crescent arms reach up into the sky.

This sky-reaching crescent is a standard mosque motif, seen from the Abdul Gaffoor mosque in Singapore:

… to Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland:

… to the Uppsala mosque in Sweden:

There is no way that the Islamic shaped crescent atop architect Paul Murdoch’s minaret-like tower is an accident, any more than THIS could possibly be an accident:

That’s before you even get to the hidden stuff, like the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent; the 9/11 date placed in the exact position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag; or the fact that the Tower of Voices turns out to be a year round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial:

Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the Bowl of Embrace redesign, which only disguised the original crescent with a few irrelevant trees.

That Islamic crescent reaching up into the sky is completely undisguised. How can anyone abide this?

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Bitter Pill: McCain Wins Florida

Michael Graham, sounding a tad bitter over at the Corner, expresses how many conservatives are feeling, tonight:

So it is over. Finished. In November, we’ll be sending out our most liberal, least trustworthy candidate vs. to take on Hillary Clinton—perhaps not more liberal than Barack Obama, but certainly far less trustworthy.

And the worst part for the Right is that McCain will have won the nomination while ignoring, insulting and, as of this weekend, shamelessly lying about conservatives and conservatism.

You think he supported amnesty six months ago? You think he was squishy on tax cuts and judicial nominees before? Wait until he has the power to anger every conservative in America, and feel good about it.

Every day, he dreams of a world filled with happy Democrats and insulted Republicans. And he is, thanks to Florida, the presidential nominee of the Republican party.

And on that note, I’m off to climb into a bottle of Bushmill’s. It’s going to be a LONG nine months.

It seems McCain’s a foregone conclusion at this point, no matter what Hugh says.  Or this guy, holding out hope for a Romney upset on Super Tuesday:

“Look,” I said to my young friends, “starting Wednesday at noon, Rush Limbaugh is going to pull out all the stops. He’s going to hammer McCain with everything he’s got. He’s going to come at him from every angle, for three solid hours, and then he’s going to do it for another three hours on Thursday, then Friday, then Monday, then Tuesday. You can count on 15 hours of Rush doing all he can to persuade conservatives not to vote for McCain, and that’s got to have some effect. Romney made it close, and a week is forever in politics. ….”

Wishful thinking. Rush has already pulled out all the stops against McCain. Take a look at his website, for crying out loud. He may as well rename it, “I Hate John McCain.com”.

Hell, he apparently even voted twice against him. Rush is a good soldier, but in the end, it wasn’t enough…for Florida, at least, and now Mitt has an increasingly difficult uphill battle ahead of him.

CBS News Analysis:

Still, it doesn’t seem likely that McCain will be able to land a knockout punch on Super Tuesday. Romney has what it takes to stay in the ring - deep pockets. And they are his own deep pockets to dip into.

The fact that these two men despise each other doesn’t bode well for the Republican party. One of them is going to emerge, battered and bruised as the party’s nominee, and then we have to expect him to beat the Democratic nominee whose rabid constituents are out numbering us at every contest, even the ones where there are no delegates at play.

The conventional wisdom has been that McCain is the only one who can beat Hillary, or Obama in November. Well, that may be true but what a bitter pill to have to swallow.

At least if his opponent is Hillary, we can look forward to “the most civilized election in American history”.

I guess congratulations are in order.

About That Kennedy Endorsement…

There are somewhat divergent views concerning its significance.

On the one hand…Bryan over at Hot Air, laughed it off:

Fossil from the Paleozoic makes the rounds with Obama, preaching “change”

(I loved that headline):

The most ridiculous spectacle of the 2008 campaign season might be 75-year-old Ted Kennedy, a man who has spent his entire career in politics, a man who has often personified divisive, attack-based politics, a man who owes his very existence on the national stage to his famous name, getting on the Barack Obama “change” bandwagon. The nation ought to be laughing up our collective sleeves about it, but instead Kennedy is treated seriously not just by the Clintons and Obama, but by the press as well.

Michelle Malkin saw it much the same way:

When I watched the Kennedy dynasty’s self-indulgent endorsement of Barack Obama yesterday, I saw a bloated, effete patriarch patting himself on the back and his candidate on the head. I heard empty platitudes and nostalgia and a desperate, windy plea for relevance.

But she takes note that David Brooks of the New York Times:

was enthralled by the “Kennedy mystique.” There was, gushed Brooks, “something important and memorable about the way the 75-year-old Kennedy communed and bonded with a rapturous crowd half a century his junior.”

Brooks goes on to say:

After his callow youth, Kennedy came to realize that life would not give him the chance to be president. But life did ask him to be a senator, and he has embraced that role and served that institution with more distinction than anyone else now living — as any of his colleagues, Republican or Democrat, will tell you.

Something is wrong with that guy!

Brooks, I mean.

Dan Riehl’s take:

Was watching Fox News with Brit’s group and Fred Barnes was laughing and dismissing the Kennedy endorsement of Obama as nothing. Without jumping on the whole group, many of these TV talking heads really are idiots, but what the hell is Fed Barnes smoking? He’s supposed to know something about politics.

As several stories indicated, this comes with access to Kennedy’s fund raising armada, not to mention that Kennedy’s sponsorship of immigration reform and other works has made him one of the favorites among a key Democrat constituency, Hispanics. Hillary is counting on huge margins there to win the nomination. And Kennedy has said, and already planned, to campaign actively for Obama.

His condescending laughter and alleged insight is nothing short of sheer stupidity.

Finally, my friend Francis W. Porretto commented here:

It’s not so much that that Clinton “ship is sinking” as that the Kennedy yin has re-ascended to equal and surpass the Clinton yang. Clintonite politics was the most successful Democrat politics of the postwar period. The Kennedys and their allegiants were regarded as yesterday’s news from roughly 1976, when Ted failed at his bid for the presidency, to 2000, when Al Gore was awarded the nomination without a struggle. But the Kennedy faction, which never completely resigned from its attempt to own the Democrat Party in toto, saw an opportunity for a renaissance in an unusual gambit: back an obvious loser in 2004 while elevating a credible candidate for 2008.

My own take:

The Kennedy “fund raising armada” Dan Riehl mentions is certainly a significant boost for Obama, but I think the “Kennedy Mystique” is just symbolic, meaningless B.S that will have no effect whatsoever on his campaign.

UPDATE:

Oh Good lord. And now, this:

At the top of Tuesday’s CBS “Early Show,” co-host Harry Smith described Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama yesterday in biblical terms: “In the civic religion that is Democratic politics, the most treasured covenant was passed to the young Senator from Illinois.”

Ace has more of the latest on the Obama/Kennedy Crap Fest.

Better Late Than Never Democrats

Peter Wehner of Commentary Magazine makes some excellent points in his latest article, The High Cost Of Hillary.

In it, he quotes the same eyebrow raising paragraph from Jonathan Chait’s column in The New Republic that jumped out at me:

Something strange happened the other day. All these different people—friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read—kept saying the same thing: They’ve suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we’ve reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons. The sentiment seems to be concentrated among Barack Obama supporters. Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing for her suggested that she might not be a good Democratic nominee. But now that loathing seems a lot less irrational.

After taking some obligatory digs at conservatives, Chait adds:

But the conservatives might have had a point about the Clintons’ character. Bill’s affair with Monica Lewinsky jeopardized the whole progressive project for momentary pleasure. The Clintons gleefully triangulated the Democrats in Congress to boost his approval rating. They do seem to have a feeling of entitlement to power.

So conservatives “might” have had a point about the Clintons’ character? The Clintons “seem” to have a feeling of entitlement to power? I should say so. What conservatives saw in the Clintons wasn’t based on any remarkable and hard-to-discern insights. After all, the Clintons’ character problems were not being hidden from public view; they were, in fact, out there for all to see, often flashing in bright neon lights. Yet people like Chait were, for political and ideological reasons, blinded to the ruthlessness and corruption of the Clinton Machine. Now that the Clintons are using their tactics on an inspiring liberal figure like Barack Obama, the scales are suddenly falling from their eyes. We are now seeing the zeal of the recent converts in action.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Not so fast, Zippy.

You know, the more I think about it…the madder I get at these low-down, opportunistic, hypocritical former Clintonites; the ones who went to the mat for Clinton during the Lewinsky affair.

Apparently, according John F. Harris at The Politico Bubba was perilously close to being asked to resign in Jan. 1998, after “a brief and cool confession”, and an “angry and self-righteous blast at his Republican tormentors” teed off some senior Dems:

Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, who warned him what he was stepping into: “You’re about three days away from a delegation of senior Democrats coming up there to ask the president to resign.”

They never came. But Democrats on Capitol Hill stood with Clinton only when polls made clear that their constituents around the country stood with him.

Instead, they attacked and ridiculed the mild mannered Kenneth Star, accusing him of being a sex obsessed, politically motivated, reactionary.

I still remember the photo-op of Congressional Democrats standing in solidarity and support of Clinton, on the Capital steps.

The far left accused Republicans of engaging in “dirty tricks”, and called the Starr investigation a “creeping Coup d’etat”.

Here are some key moments from The Lewinsky saga of 1998:

Jan 25, 1998: Clinton political adviser James Carville says “a war” will be waged between Clinton supporters and Kenneth Starr over Starr’s investigation tactics.

*

Jan 17, 1998: First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton says in a broadcast interview that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” is behind the charges against her husband.

*

Feb 11, 1998: First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton predicts the allegations against her husband “will slowly dissipate over time under the weight of its own insubstantiality.”

*

Feb 26, 1998: [Clinton loyalists spring into action] White House senior communications aide Sidney Blumenthal testifies before the grand jury, answering questions about any role he may have played in spreading negative information about investigators in Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s office. Fourteen Democrats in the House write Attorney General Janet Reno complaining about subpoenas issued by Starr. A non-profit group that studies women in the workplace says it will contribute $10,000 as seed money for a legal defense fund for Lewinsky.

*

May 27, 1998: Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, Bill Ginsburg writes an angry “open letter” to Ken Starr which was published in “California Lawyer.” “Congratulations, Mr. Starr! As a result of your callous disregard for cherished constitutional rights, you may have succeeded in unmasking a sexual relationship between two consenting adults.” It is reported that death threats were made against Linda Tripp when the Lewinsky scandal first broke in January and she was moved to a safe house.

*

Saturday, Dec. 19, 1998: The House passed the first article of impeachment, dividing almost exactly along party lines. Only five Democrats joined the Republican majority to approve the article by a vote of 228 to 206, and just five Republicans crossed the other way to oppose it.

So in 1998, when the Clintons were at their sleeziest, and most corrupt, most Democrats were unwavering in their Support for them, and contemptuous of their political enemies.

Now, ten years later, they’re once again witnessing the Clintons’ tried and true modus operandi, only this time it’s being used against a popular fellow Democrat, so all of a sudden Bill and Hill are no longer cool.

In fact, an alarming number of Democrats are jumping off the Clinton ship:

Back to Peter Wehner:

A partial list includes Senators Kennedy, Kerry, and Leahy; former Clinton Administration cabinet member Robert Reich; former Clinton lawyer Greg Craig (whom Bill Clinton asked to lead the defense team the White House assembled for his impeachment battle); liberal radio talk show host Ed Schultz; liberal columnists E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Frank Rich, William Greider, Bob Herbert, Joe Klein, and now Chait; Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, who described Bill Clinton as America’s “first black president”; and others.

I’m hearing rumors that Gore will be next.

Clintonites one day, Obamamessiah worshippers the next.

Opportunistic vermin: They know a sinking ship when they see one.

Rick Santorum “On A Tear” Against McCain

According to Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner:

The former senator has been on a tear against McCain for weeks. Many conservatives admire Santorum and will take his views on the presidential race into account. But McCain’s positions on immigration, global warming, and the re-importation of prescription drugs are already widely known. What isn’t widely known is how McCain operates in the cloakroom. Santorum gave us a hint on the Hugh Hewitt show a while ago:

I mean, this is a guy who says he believes in these things, but I can tell you, inside the room, when we were in these meetings, there was nobody who fought harder not to have these votes before the United States Senate on some of the most important social conservative issues, whether it’s marriage or abortion or the like. He always fought against us to even bring them up, because he was uncomfortable voting for them.

Senator Santorum: What abortion legislation did McCain want to hold up? More specifics, please.

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times, McCain is embarrassed by conservatives.

So, Santorum has been rather conspicuously campaigning against McCain, as noticed, (and not appreciated) by Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

After passing along an anecdote about Santorum’s behavior on a plane, (making campaign calls on Romney’s behalf to big GOP donors, witnessed by a Democratic operative), Beth cuts loose about what a shameless hypocrite, Santorum is.

She makes note of a recent The Weekly Standard piece by Steven Hayes:

Although many others have been as critical of McCain, perhaps no one has been as hypocritical. In 2006, when Santorum was running for reelection, he asked McCain to come to Pennsylvania to campaign on his behalf. When McCain obliged, Santorum put the video on his campaign website, listing it first among “key events” of the year. That’s gratitude, Santorum-style.

That is troubling, ain’t no doubt. If Santorum had such a low opinion of McCain, he shouldn’t have used him, but he was in a desperate fight for his Senate seat, and I’m sure he figured he could pick up some moderates that way.

I don’t know if it’s possible to be in politics for any length of time and not get your hands a little dirty, at some point.

I’m not making excuses for Santorum, I’m just trying to put it in perspective. On balance, I’m much more concerned by McCain’s discomfort with cultural conservatism, and tendency to go along with liberals, than I am by Santorum’s backstabbing. Sorry, Beth. (I’d still vote for the SOB in the general).

And I believe that Santorum is being totally sincere about his misgivings with McCain.

UPDATE: 

A trusted Senate source got back to Ramesh Ponnuru on his request for “More specifics, please”.

McCain stood in the middle of the GOP cloakroom and yelled at several of his Senate colleagues because they deigned to have a vote — to have a vote — on Inhofe’s “English As the National Language” amendment to the 2006 immigration bill.  He accused conservatives of being “divisive” and “insulting” Latinos for suggesting that immigrants ought to learn this language.  He was nasty and unhinged. About 10 staffers witnessed this. He delighted in telling the conservative senators there that they were destroying the party with these efforts.  This is what Santorum is talking about.  He had antipathy for social and cultural conservatives’ efforts.

Okay, if I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand and one times.

Man Uses Stun Gun On Toddler

I swear…I’ll never understand what could cause a person to abuse his/her own child, in this case an 18 month old. This man must be demon-possessed:

Prosecutor Reed Dinsmore said the stun gun delivered 30,000 volts during testing.

“This is a case of a father torturing his 18-month-old son,” prosecutor Reed Dinsmore said. “Why? We can’t tell.”

He said it’s not yet known whether the child will suffer long-term nerve or neurological damage.

The prosecution said the child’s mother saw marks on the boy in January 2007 and, thinking it was a rash, wanted to take him to a doctor.

But Wittman talked her out of it, Dinsmore said.

“He described to her that he used the stun gun to play peekaboo with the child,” Dinsmore said.

Someone please explain to this man that stun guns are not used in playing peekaboo. They tend to take the fun out of it.

“The mother did not report the incident, and that was a mistake on her part.”

Shame shame shame!

After a second incident in February, she took the child to her sister’s home and then to the police. Doctors at Samaritan Albany General Hospital found numerous wounds conforming to the stun gun’s electrode pattern.

“I spoke to a Department of Human Services careworker who was present, and she said the look in the child’s eyes will not easily be forgotten,” Dinsmore said.

The husband is saying that the injuries were caused by the mother, that they had had an argument earlier that day, and she had said, “You’ll be sorry as she took the boy from the home.

Well, all I know is, the Dept. of Human Services in Albany, Oregon had better figure out who’s telling the truth,  quickly. The child should be put in foster care until the truth is known.

This story makes the  Do’s And Don’ts With Baby jokes,  seem a lot less funny.

Hat tip: Crime Scene KC 

Rudy, Rudy, Rudy

Rudy has a new ad out in which his non endorsements from major newspapers are presented as a badge of honor. It’s a clever ad, and positions him to the right of McCain on taxes.

Sadly, this ad appears to be too little, too late. It’s only an internet ad, according to Allahpundit, and it needs to be airing on major t.v. stations in Florida if it’s to have any effect.

Giuliani’s lagging behind McCain and Romney in Florida, and is now in a fight against Huckabee for third. The early voting results are not looking promising, either, based on polling data.

Allahpundit wonders if he’ll quit before Super Tuesday if he comes in fourth. He may as well.

I feel bad for Rudy. I think he would have been a strong candidate in the general, but his position on abortion, and his late start in the primaries have prevented him from getting any traction.

I would have had no problem voting for him in November.