After just 12 months: Under water in the opinion polls, batting 0.000 on major legislation, and 0-3 in the last three notable elections, President Obama needed a home run speech.

This morning the only thing being talked about is Samuel Alito mouthing the truth and Hillary Clinton's absence.

The so-called "awsomeness" has worn completely off now and there is no experience anywhere in the President's background that he can call on to guide him through this.

Sadly, we have sunk to a point where, domestically, the country is now sort of protected by his total fecklessness. And for someone who would take a grid-locked Congress over almost any other kind this brings a perverse comfort.

In terms of national security, however, his flailing inexperience is no comfort whatsoever. It is very, very frightening.

Explanation here.

A Second Entry:

And by "Sarah Palin", I mean "Barack Obama".

Any of you Bush-Deranged Moonbats out there want to make another "My Pet Goat" joke now?

Barack Obama....Lightworker!

(Hat Tip: Jammie Wearing Fool)

UPDATE (From the comments on this topic over at Riehl World View):

What is even more disturbing than the need to whip TOTUS out to talk to school kids is the purpose of Obama's visit to that school. He was announcing his desire to put billions more into his program "Race to the Top" (RttT in Obamaland cutespeak) and also create a means for school districts to bypass the authority of their State Boards of Education in order to apply for federal RttT funds. What is so disturbing about this? One of the requirements of winning this federal grant money is that local school districts must contractually agree to adopt federal curriculum guidelines, even those that have not yet been defined by the Obama Administration. Yup....the federal core curriculum issue rears its ugly head again.

Obama created the local school district bypass to these federal dollars in response to Rick Perry's decision for Texas to opt out. Obama can't stand Perry and the State of Texas....and was not about yield the chess board.

I wonder if these particular grade-schoolers were forced into learning and performing another one of those "Dear Leader" type songs in honor of the President's visit.

Unworthy of its audience.

From Victor Davis Hanson:

If you are confused by the first nine months of the Obama administration, take solace that there is at least a pattern. The president, you see, thinks America is a university and that he is our campus president. Keep that in mind, and almost everything else makes sense.

Read the whole thing.

Just like any anti-Bush rant employed some mention of Halliburton, as though mentioning the oil field services giant automatically trumped any pro-Bush or pro-GWOT argument, it has always been an article of faith among the nation's BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) sufferers that he was incompetent. Whether you agree with the sentiment or not, we have all seen anti-Bush rants laced with some variation of "the incompetence of the last 8 years."

Now comes President Obama. The One. Super-hip. Zen-like. Jesus 2.0.

Our new President will not be incompetent like "everyone agrees everywhere" the last President was.

No siree!

So how is it that the incompetent Bush managed to get Congress to vote to go to war but with control of all three branches of the government...not to mention a super-majority of seats in the Senate...the all-competent President Obama can't get a health care bill passed that he says everyone wants?

I know, Bush lied. Sure.

For the sake of argument let us stipulate that YouTube doesn't exist and that you can't go back and look at countless pre-2000 clips of a parade of Clinton Administration officials saying the exact same things about Saddam Hussein's Iraq that Bush did. Or British officials. Or other government's intelligence findings. Sponsoring terror groups? Check. Genocide? Check. WMD? Check.

Even if he lied (he didn't) he still got the congress to vote for something that they all say....now....that they knew was a bad idea.

Yet the Prince of the American Renewal can't get his own party, which has total control over congress, to pass any of his trademark legislation.

For a guy that hasn't heard the word, "No", in about six years that has to be tough. Thomas Sowell hit the nail on the head when he said that "Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved by not achieving anything else".

And this is why he was totally unprepared when he went before the American people (as though descending from Mount Sinai) and told them what his vision was for the future of their health care in America....

....and the American people said, "F*** you!"

"Hope and Change" to "Hack and Same" in eight months.

I know, I know.....the word Fascist gets thrown out in political discussions more than it should but I do mean it.

Don't freak out, Obamatons, I didn't say Hitlerism. I said Fascism. In the sense of pre-World War II 1930's Italian Fascism that was all the rage among the intellegentsia throughout the world.

Explain to me why this whole Government/Uniom takeover/ownership of both GM and Chrysler doesn't amount to that type of government/industrial system.

When you voted for Hope and Change, did you ever think that your candidate would nationalize two of the big three auto makers? Is there any indication that major banks won't be next?

And how would you like to be Ford right now? Not taking Obamabucks handouts from the Feds, struggling to make it as a private enterprise, but now you have to negotiate a labor contract with the UAW. The same UAW who know owns a huge stake in BOTH of your domestic competitors. A conflict of interest for the UAW? Fear not, President Obama will smooth it over with his velvety baritone and a teleprompter set to scroll at just the right speed.

I have purchased my last GM vehicle. When the time comes for a new purchase I will look first to Ford, then to Toyota.

At this point, with both the government and the unions sweeping in to take over GM and Chrysler I want their "experiment" to fail. Fail hard. Fail big. Fail massively.

They will not get another cent from me because they forgot one little detail: They didn't pass a law that requires me to buy GM or Chrysler.

Yet, anyway.

And by "woobie", I mean the security blanket that is his teleprompter.

I watched the President again on the television this morning and he must have been using his "woobie" again.

Up to now I have just watched him speak and have never really noticed anything.....until this morning.

He. Never. Looks. Straight. Ahead.

Giving his most earnest look he turns from side to side...and to the exact angle offset each time. Even though the bulk of the listeners in the room with him are sitting directly in front of him.

Never. Straight. Ahead.

And once you do notice it, it is all you see.

Just got this in an email from a friend who knows a guy whose hairdresser's cousin works in the Department of Defense. Or something.

It is the President's new Woobie Teleprompter. No more ugly glass panels or big screen TV's to help the greatest orator of our time get through a newser.

Anyone heard the term "Lightworker" in a while?

Me neither.

There is no question that being the first African-American elected President makes Barack Obama a transformative figure. He wasn't my choice but his election did answer a question as to whether an African-American could be elected President at all*.

So a mighty blow for equality has been struck. But don't think for a minute that this means the equal opportunity to fail.

As the first African-American President Obama was.....um....transformed....from a guy who just happened to be the 44th President into He Who Cannot Be Seen To Fail.

Such figures require a large "Underbus" to hold those who must "fail" in service to preserving the legacy of the transformative figure lest the transformative itself be seen to fail.

I think Rahm Immanuel is soon to be relegated to the Underbus.

* My answer was always, "Yes", but I was wrong. And stupid. And naive about the "real Amerikkka" according to my betters. The funny thing is that now that it has happened, according to my betters I am still wrong, stupid, and naive about the "real Amerikkka."

It isn't so surprising, really. Reading just a few Presidential-level daily security threat assessments is probably enough to change anyone's worldview somewhat.

More likely is that up until Candidate Obama became President-Elect Obama he was not so much in "The War is Wrong" business as he was in the "Bush is wrong/McCain is wrong" business just like every politician is in "The Other Guy Is Wrong" business.

Bush will be gone in six weeks and within a couple of years will begin to be treated much better by history than he has been by the infantile mainstream press.

And now President-Elect Obama has had thrust upon him the highest office in the land and is beginning to realize that he will be subject to all of the same constraints begat by reality that his predecessors in office were.

The swooning nutroots just knew that a President Obama would have them out of Iraq in a matter of months if not weeks.

The constraints of reality have intervened.

The Obama position on Iraq looks much more similar to the Bush position than it does to anything coming out of The DailyKos or the Puffington Host.

Gitmo? President Obama is theoretically a high-powered lawyer who is surrounded by other high-powered lawyers. And they have been advocating the closure of Gitmo for years now. Which means that they have had years to figure out what to do with everyone being held at Gitmo and would have no excuses for Gitmo still being open and holding prisoners 30 days after the new administration takes office.

I think reality will intervene here also. Gitmo is full of bad actors who are essentially men without countries. If they don't stay at Gitmo they have to go somewhere.

So I have to ask: How long does Gitmo continue to operate before those that think of President Obama as a *cough* Lightworker begin to feel betrayed or deceived?

(The original title of this post said Reality 1, Obama 0...but I don't actually know that Barack Obama didn't understand reality before the election but was playing to the tools and fools on the extreme left that wanted us out of Iraq, now, regardless of the slaughter that would surely follow.)

For a good while now I've been doing some study and reading on Urban vs. Rural/Suburban and its impact on our founding documents, political persuasion and policy. I guess this fascination started shortly after I read Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in my attempt to understand what all our high paid consultants where trying to do with Downtown Midland. I've always known anecdotally that "City Folk don't think like us," but I never really had a good feel for how and why that is, until I started reading.

Peter Brown has a piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend that outlined some of the changes in perception and policy that may accompany the Country's first "Urban President."

There are a number of issues, many of them controversial, that have an urban/suburban/rural tilt:

Take guns, for instance. Urban dwellers, according to public opinion polls, are much more likely to favor stricter gun control than are those who live in exurban or rural communities.

Not surprisingly, those who live in cities see a need for more money to be spent on mass transportation. Those who live in suburban and rural areas, where a much larger percentage of people have cars, prefer new roads.

Those who live in cities are less likely to have widespread contact with military families, who disproportionately live outside of them. It is a reasonable assumption that this translates into lesser support for military spending than for those who live in the suburbs and rural areas.

The list could go on a lot longer.

And, to put it simply, birds of a feather flock together.

I'm starting to get the impression that Urban living has already quashed Liberty and Freedom as envisioned by the Founders, which explains why some 50% of the population (mostly Urban) doesn't see the coming socialist storm...they've been getting rained on for decades, so what's the big deal?

Ohh well... at least public transportation may be a bigger priority than new road construction, so I guess EZ Rider is safe for another 4 years.

It looks like we will have new President.

What do we do now? Well, a certain amount of disappointment is in order. And relief that it is all over...at least for the next year or so before people begin showing up in Iowa again.

The sun will come up tomorrow and I will remain in goods spirits unless President Obama's politics become interested in me. They may. They may not. We will have to see.

The Left has a bigger problem. They have right now all that they think they want or need. It will make them happier than they typically are for a time but they will regress to their steady state of generally miserable and pissy because President Obama cannot create a world that is as 'fair' as he describes or that they desire.

At least some portion of the "95% of taxpayers" who voted for Obama will be waiting for their tax cuts.

Peggy Joseph will, in a year's time, begin to realize that President Obama isn't taking care of her gasoline payment nor her mortgage as she had hoped.

As for the race issue, it appears to have helped Obama more than it has hurt him and all things remaining equal it is a great thing that our country is a place that will allow a black man to become the President.

So congratulations to Team Obama. They ran a successful campaign and won. Was it a fair one? With an In The Tank Media blocking any and all threats as hard as they could, I would say no. But that isn't Obama's fault. That is the media's fault.

A parting question: Will the press grant to Obama enough equality that, should it come to it, they will allow him to fail?

The picture becomes clearer on just exactly exactly whose wealth Barack Obama plans on spreading around. A few months ago a foreign newspaper...(doing the work that Americans won't do!) located Barack Obama's half-brother George living in a hut in Africa, somehow managing to survive on an income of $12USD per year. Twelve. Dollars. Per. Year.

Now we find that Obama's cherished great aunt, Zeituni Onyango, has been located living in a Boston housing project. Some reports describe her conditions as living in squalor. Or in a slum. I don't really know. You can pretty much guess that Aunt Zeituni is getting by on much less than what it takes to keep the Obama kids in dance lessons, though.

Plus, it took a newspaper (again, a foreign paper) to locate this cherished aunt.

Keep in mind that John and Cindy McCain have actually adopted a child out of the Third World and all we hear about is the number of houses he owns. At the same time Barack Obama talks about "spreading the wealth" and "how we should treat the least of our brothers" and his fanboys in the American media swoon....while their foreign counterparts are out actually earning their paychecks locating two examples of weapons-grade hypocrisy on The One's part.

Now I realize that nobody should be compelled to use their hard earned dollars to alleviate the difficulties of their cherished relatives.

No, that money is to be used for total strangers selected by the government.

From the Washington Post...finally.

Faced with a huge influx of donations over the Internet, the campaign has also chosen not to use basic security measures to prevent potentially illegal or anonymous contributions from flowing into its accounts, aides acknowledged. Instead, the campaign is scrutinizing its books for improper donations after the money has been deposited.

They'll refund any improper donations, okay, racist? Move along. Show's over. Nothing to see here.

Oh, wait. How are they going to do that, exactly?

In recent weeks, questionable contributions have created headaches for Obama's accounting team as it has tried to explain why campaign finance filings have included itemized donations from individuals using fake names, such as Es Esh or Doodad Pro. Those revelations prompted conservative bloggers to further test Obama's finance vetting by giving money using the kind of prepaid cards that can be bought at a drugstore and cannot be traced to a donor.

The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.

So Team Obama....so scary smart and web-saavy that it made fun of McCain for not using e-mail...sets up its donations web page and deliberately cripples the address verification system and also set it up to allow donations from untraceable pre-paid credit cards. So that not only will it allow illegal over-contributions from known individuals, it will allow anyone, anywhere to make any number and amount of donations using a payment method that is untraceable.

This is the Hope that we have been waiting for? This is the Change?

No.

This is crooked. This is dishonest. This is good old fashioned Chicago machine style politics.

And on Tuesday of next week we get to see if Mr. Obama gets to begin staffing the federal government with the same type of people that are running his campaign and that run Chicago.

But they refuse to release it.

Did you see that amazing video obtained by the Los Angeles Times of Sen. Barack Obama toasting a prominent former PLO member at an Arab American Action Network meeting in 2003? The video in which Obama gives Yasser Arafat's frontman a warm embrace, as Bill Ayers look on?

I have no doubt that the contents of this video would be an issue for some and a non-issue for others, but the problem is that when it involves The Chosen One, Barack Obama, the LA Times doesn't consider their readers (or anyone else) fit to decide this for themselves.

What do you think that the LA Times would do if they attained a video tape of Sarah Palin toasting and hugging some members of whatever Alaskan seccesionist group that they tried to pin her to? Do you think we would be seeing that video so that we could "decide for ourselves"?

Hell, yes we would. Three times an hour on every cable news show.

But Barack Obama hanging with the PLO with William Ayers...you know, that guy from the neighborhood that Obama barely knows...looking on approvingly?

Just like Obama's redistributionist comments from as far back as 2001 (No, it didn't start with Joe the Plumber).

Just like the Obama campaign website's donation page deliberate crippling of the standard address matching and verification system found on every other e-commerce site on the planet so that it would accept illegal amounts from illegal locations.

No. Nothing to see here. Move along.

The Media has a Transformative Figure to elect and if us rubes out here in flyover country actually have access to all of the information we may screw it all up.

It isn't just the media that decided that Joe "The Plumber" Wurzlebacher's life needed to be made an open book for his questioning of The One. The media obviously had help from official Ohio or at least parts of it.

Ohio's inspector general is investigating why a state agency director approved checking the state child-support computer system for information on "Joe the Plumber."

Helen Jones-Kelly, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, confirmed today that she OK'd the check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher following the Oct. 15 presidential debate.

She said there were no political reasons for the check on the sudden presidential campaign fixture though the Support Enforcement Tracking System.

[snip]

At least four state computer checks on Wurzelbacher were conducted shortly after Republican John McCain frequently brought up "Joe the Plumber" during his final presidential debate with Democrat Barack Obama on Oct. 15.

Is Helen Jones-Kelly, the Ohio official who accessed Joe's record an Obama supporter?

Well, perhaps she is.

I am sure the media will get right on that.

UPDATE: Note to National Media Head Lice: Don't bother. The blogosphere has done your damned job for you. Again.

Charles Krauthammer on why he is voting for McCain:

Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

Krauthammer is no fan of McCain and I feel his pain there. Truly, I do.

More:

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There's just no comparison.

I would say, "Amen" here, but to some that would seem like an inappropriate intrusion of religion. Or something.

At least that is what I get from SupportBillAyers.org, a web site dedicated to obfuscating the fact that William Ayers is an unrepentant bomber/killer who is still very enthusiastic about the overthrow of the American form of government.

Not a bomber. Not a killer. Not a domestic terrorist out of jail because of a technicality.

No, it's only true "that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans."

And you have to love the opening sentence of that particular blog post over at this site:

It seems that the character assassination and slander of Bill Ayers and other people who have known Obama is not about to let up.

As opposed to actual assassination, I suppose....something William Ayers is actually guilty of.

And just a point of clarification: Ayers is not being pilloried because he knows Obama. He is being pilloried because he is a proven domestic terrorist/bomber/killer.

Obama is being pilloried because of his association with Ayers. Not the other way around.

What is the bigger question: What does Obama see in Ayers that he really likes? Or...what does Ayers see in Obama that he really likes?

(h/t Volokh Conspiracy)