Red State

Leslie Brockette Leudtke and Kevin Carl Robinson - the two suspects - didn't just happen to have incendiary devices in their car trunk. They had a plan. Via Protein Wisdom Pub:

Pair arrested after large McCain sign torched in Sellwood yard

PORTLAND, Ore. - Authorities have arrested two men after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a 4-foot by 8-foot campaign sign for Republican presidential candidate John McCain in a southeast Portland yard.

Karen Scrutton said she was asleep inside her home at 7956 S.E. 17th Ave. in the Sellwood neighborhood when she saw her sign go up in flames after 1 a.m.

"I screamed upstairs to my husband, 'Jean! Jean!" she said.

A neighbor heard a crash and chased off one of the suspects. Jean Scrutton said his son-in-law found another suspect not far away.

And yes, "Molotov cocktails." That's what it says on the news release.

Moe Lane

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H/T to Okie Campaigns

As I experience my worst college football season in my lifetime - Michigan fan living in Columbus, Ohio - and the economy heads toward whatever it is heading toward, I thought I would offer a little comic relief. The picture below was take in the parking lot of a local grocery store.

Outstanding. There shall be no excerpts. Read it all and hope that there are people paying heed.

Lots and lots of people have probably written and are probably continuing to write letters addressed to the North Pole swearing to Santa that they will be good little--or big--boys and girls if only Barack Obama gets elected President and gives them the New New Deal they have lusted for ever since the Old New Deal ran its course.

To which, Santa should reply "FORGET IT!"

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

"President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services," said Cole, also a UCLA professor of economics. "So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Cole and Ohanian were able to establish average wages and prices across a range of industries just prior to the Depression. By adjusting for annual increases in productivity, they were able to use the 1929 benchmark to figure out what prices and wages would have been during every year of the Depression had Roosevelt's policies not gone into effect. They then compared those figures with actual prices and wages as reflected in the Conference Board data.

In the three years following the implementation of Roosevelt's policies, wages in 11 key industries averaged 25 percent higher than they otherwise would have done, the economists calculate. But unemployment was also 25 percent higher than it should have been, given gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, prices across 19 industries averaged 23 percent above where they should have been, given the state of the economy. With goods and services that much harder for consumers to afford, demand stalled and the gross national product floundered at 27 percent below where it otherwise might have been.

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Will Wilkinson is golden. Naomi Klein really should stop volunteering to be humiliated in debate concerning Friedman's legacy. And since it cannot be said enough, I shall say it again: If Friedman was alive, he would have been more than glad to debate Klein, he would have filleted her and he would have smiled throughout the entire process.

Once again, I condemn inflammatory comments directed at any Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate by anyone at any rally. But someone really needs to clue Kathleen Hall Jamieson in on something:

But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania an author of 15 books on politics, says the vitriol [against Obama] has been encouraged by inflammatory words from the stage.

"Red-meat rhetoric elicits emotional responses in those already disposed by ads using words such as 'dangerous' 'dishonorable' and 'risky' to believe that the country would be endangered by election of the opposing candidate," she said.

First of all, the overwhelming majority of people who appear in McCain-Palin rallies are respectful and the very opposite of boorish. Secondly, where was Jamieson's handwringing when Obama and Biden said that McCain was "dishonorable" or "erratic"? Why wasn't this "red-meat rhetoric" condemned so vociferously.

I am looking for a reason other than "John McCain has an 'R' next to his name" for an answer to this question.

John McCain predicted the storm and tried to warn people that it was coming.

Barack Obama, by contrast, stayed utterly silent as the storm clouds gathered.

And now he wants to be President?

[Update]: A statement about the hate crime from Katon Dawson, SC GOP Chair:

"This cowardly attempt to intimidate our conservative Republican reform team here in South Carolina will motivate our volunteers and activists to work that much harder for our candidates up and down the ballot. The destructive actions of these vandals should be taken as a sign of desperation. They clearly lack the energy, ideas and candidates to compete in this election - and are running scared."

Vandals strike York County GOP headquarters

By Matt Garfield

Vandals spray-painted the words "Republican means slavery" on the door of the York County GOP campaign headquarters overnight Friday.

Party volunteers called police after discovering the message when they arrived at the office on Rock Hill's Oakland Avenue. The vandals also stole about 45 candidate signs from the front yard and spray-painted over a banner that carried a picture of Republican presidential nominee John McCain. Their messages included lettering and symbols sometimes used by gangs.

Well, at least they weren't using firearms to make their points.

Yet.

Moe Lane

PS: I'd just like to note for the record that, grammatically speaking, "Republican" is either an adjective (which means that it cannot be properly equated with "slavery," which is a noun), or it is a proper noun (which means that it cannot be properly equated with "slavery," which is a abstract concept [no, really: there are no slavery atoms]). I mention this just to point out to our Democratic colleagues that they're apparently doing just as well with the public education system as they did with the subprime mortgage industry.

[Note by Jeff:] An even more basic educational deficiency, Moe, could be the fact these upstanding citizens apparently never learned in school which party's President issued that pesky old Emancipation Proclamation...

Or are your internal polls telling you something?

H/T Hot Air

Skip to the end, where he informs the audience that they will not be "hoodwinked" or "bamboozled." Sound familiar? Of course it does: he pulled the same trick against Hillary Clinton in South Carolina, as well-known VRWC rag The New Republic reported at the time:

His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist. As soon as I heard that Obama had quoted from Malcolm X like this, I knew that Obama would win South Carolina by a massive margin.

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Syndicated columnist Ben Shapiro, targeting Jewish voters, has put together a set of YouTube videos making the "Jewish case against Barack Obama."

You can see the preview here and the three parts are below the fold. It may be called the "Jewish case against Barack Obama," but it might as well just be the case against Barack Obama.

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The lamestream media has been doing a pretty good job of shielding Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats from blame in the current credit crisis. It's therefore no surprise that when Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) was called out for it by Steve Moore, her first instinct was to lie:

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This is going to be one whale of an investigation, if true:

Obama fundraiser, convicted of fraud, spills beans

Oct 11 03:26 AM US/Eastern By MIKE ROBINSON Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - Jailed political fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko, the Chicago real estate developer who helped launch Barack Obama on his political career, is whispering secrets to federal prosecutors about corruption in Illinois and the political fallout could be explosive.

Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose administration faces multiple federal investigations over how it handed out jobs and money with advice from Rezko, is considered the most vulnerable.

Rezko also was friendly with Obama—offering him a job when he finished law school, funding his earliest political campaigns and purchasing a lot next to his house. But based on the known facts, charges so far and testimony at Rezko's trial, there's no indication there'll be an October surprise that could hurt the Democratic presidential nominee—even though Rezko says prosecutors are pressing him for dirt about Obama.

"I think this strikes fear into the Blagojevich administration and the Statehouse Democrats but not into the Obama campaign," says state Sen. Kirk Dillard, R-Westmont, a John McCain delegate to the GOP convention but an old friend of Obama.

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They can't because they don't have any facilities for cross-checking, and the order by a judge to require Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to certify the results and make them available just got reversed by the 6th District Court of Appeals.

The problem is, of course, long-time Democratic ally ACORN:

Thousands of new-voter cards in Ohio undeliverable

By Jim Siegel

COLUMBUS - Thousands of cards mailed by county election boards to newly registered voters in Hamilton County and throughout the state are being returned because the people can't be found.

[snip]

Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert Bennett on Tuesday said it's a result of statewide registration fraud conducted by independent groups that support Democratic candidates.

[snip]

He said many were submitted by groups he terms "auxiliaries of the Democratic Party": the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and America Coming Together.

Oops! Silly me. That's a story from 2004, which would be the last time ACORN tried to commit voter registration fraud in Ohio during a Presidential election.

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For Sunday, October 5, 2008

FOX News Sunday (FNS): Host Chris Wallace talks to McCain campaign manager Rick Davis and chief Obama strategist David Axelrod; then he moves to surrogates Tim Pawlenty and Ed Rendell.

This Week (ABC): Host George Stephanopoulos talks about the financial mess with House Republican whip Roy Blunt and with one of the fiasco's architects, Barney Frank.

Meet the Press (NBC): Moderator Tom Brokaw hosts two New Mexico Congressmen: Tom Udall (D) and Steve Pearce (R). They're running for the U.S.Senate seat currently held by Republican Pete Domenici.

Face the Nation (CBS): Host Bob Schieffer talks politics with Lindsey Graham; Dem Governor Bill Ritter of Colorado, Richmond's Dem Mayor Doug Wilder, and Republican Representative Adam Putnam of Florida. The he chats about the Wall Street meltdown with Dr. C. Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the former assistant secretary of the Treasury for international affairs under… President… Jimmy… Carter.

Late Edition (CNN): Host Wolf Blitzer chats with Steve Forbes, Robert Reich, Specter and Schumer, and the always-irate Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And his usual cast of thousands.

Why Davis & Axelrod (FNS)? Better would be Schmidt & Axelrod or Davis & Plouffe (rhymes with "puff"). I'm just sayin'.

Word is that McCain is now calling Chris Dodd and Barney Frank (TW) for paving our road to this financial mess. I approve of that message, as it is easy-to-grasp and true. Congressman Blunt, who can play hardball with the best of them, can make short work of Barney if he wants.

Can we hold Domenici's seat (MTP)?

I don't know what to make of Schieffer's half hour (FTN) this week, but it's currently the top rated Sunday Show.

When Arlen Specter, God love him, is to speak (LE), I become nervous. We know Chuckie's going to bring the acid.