The WSJ got hold of the video, which had been closed to the press.

Allah notes Time has already begun the delegitimzing:

Palin-skeptics may, perhaps, enjoy Time’s write-up of the event, featuring snotty asides about her “rattling off financial terms of art” and “rambling” about the ancient land bridge that once joined Asia to Alaska.

Yes, "rambling" about the typical ice-breaking remarks about how "you and I are more connected than we think," and yes, it is very suspicious that this Aerial Lupine Assassin was capable of grasping anything about finance.

Hmmm... She seems to be trying out a campaign theme. See if you can spot it.

You can call me a common-sense conservative. My approach to the issues facing my country and the world, issues that weÂ’ll discuss today, are rooted in this common-sense conservatismÂ… Common sense conservatism deals with the reality of the world as it is. Complicated and beautiful, tragic and hopeful, we believe in the rights and the responsibilities and the inherent dignity of the individual.

We donÂ’t believe that human nature is perfectible; weÂ’re suspicious of government efforts to fix problems because often what itÂ’s trying to fix is human nature, and that is impossible. It is what it is. But that doesnÂ’t mean that weÂ’re resigned to, well, any negative destiny. Not at all. I believe in striving for the ideal, but in realistic confines of human natureÂ…

On Liberalism:

The opposite of a common-sense conservative is a liberalism that holds that there is no human problem that government canÂ’t fix if only the right people are put in charge. Unfortunately, history and common sense are not on its side. We donÂ’t trust utopian promises; we deal with human nature as it is.

...

On the Financial Crisis

Lack of government wasnÂ’t the problem. Government policies were the problem. The marketplace didnÂ’t fail. It became exactly as common sense would expect it to. The government ordered the loosening of lending standards. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. The government forced lending institutions to give loans to people who, as I say, couldnÂ’t afford them. Speculators spotted new investment vehicles, jumped on board and rating agencies underestimated risks.

...

On deficits and Reaganism:

Common sense tells you that when youÂ’re in a hole, you have to stop digging! A common sense conservative looks to history to find solutions to the problems confronting us, and the good news is that history has shown us a way out of this, a way forward from recession. Ronald Reagan, he was faced with an even worse recession, and he showed us how to get out of here.

If you want real job growth, you cut taxes! And you reduce marginal tax rates on all Americans. Cut payroll taxes, eliminate capital gain taxes and slay the death tax, once and for all. Get federal spending under control, and then you step back and you watch the U.S. economy roar back to life. But it takes more courage for a politician to step back and let the free market correct itself than it does to push through panicky solutions or quick fixesÂ…

I canÂ’t wait until we get that Reaganomics sense supplied again because we are going to survive, and weÂ’re going to thrive and expand and roar back to life. And as the world sees this, the world will be a healthier, more secure, safer and more prosperous place when this happens.
...

On health care:

I seem to have acquired notoriety in national debate. And all because of two words: death panels. And it is a serious term. It was intended to sound a warning about the rationing that is sure to follow if big government tries to simultaneously increase health care coverage while also claiming to decrease costs. Government has just got to be honest with the people about thisÂ….

As I said, itÂ’s just common sense to realize that governmentÂ’s attempts to solve large problems like the health-care challenges that we have, more often create new ones, and a top down one size fits all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for some one-fifth of our economy.

Common sense also tells us that passing a trillion dollar new retirement program, thatÂ’s not the way to reduce health-care spending. Real health-care reform is market oriented, patient centered and result driven. It would give all individuals the same tax benefit, that an ideal plan that I would have in mind, same tax benefits as those who get coverage through their employers. And give Medicare recipients vouchers so that they can buy their own coverage. And reform tort laws and change regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top down government plan, we should give Americans themselves control over their own health care with market friendly responsible ideas.

I'm not being snarky about the campaign theme -- every campaign needs one and every campaign has one. She's obviously picked hers. Works, I think.

More excerpts at the WSJ, and at Allah's link. He has video, too, which I left behind, because I'm stealing the WSJ stuff.

Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (21)
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Iowahawk, putting the "fun" in "funemployment."

Posted by: Ace at 12:32 PM | Add Comment
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Is Obama following the story closely now?

The IRS says it is severing ties with ACORN, the community activist group involved in a scandal after employees were caught on video giving advice to a couple posing as a prostitute and pimp.

The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday it would no longer include ACORN in its volunteer tax assistance program. The program offered free tax advice to about 3 million low- and moderate-income tax filers this spring.

It should be noted that Treasury head Tim Geithner seems to have gotten his tax advice from ACORN (tin cup buried in the back yard?), so maybe he's just a little bit crankypants about that.

Thanks to yarrrr.

Reid: No Hearings on ACORN! Posted by: Ace at 12:20 PM | Add Comment
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Status update? Jonathan G. Parker is thinking maybe he could have waited until he got home to see if anyone had thrown a Zombie at him.

The victim later noticed that the intruder also used her computer to check his Facebook status, and his account was still open when she checked the computer.

The victim later noticed that she was missing two diamond rings from her dresser in the same room as her computer.

The two rings were worth more than $3,500, reports indicate.

...

If convicted he faces one to 10 years in prison, at at least six mentions on the FAILblog.

I made up the last half-sentence but it's true.

Found at Snapped Shot, who's posting on Craig Deeds' major FAIL on tax policy.

Posted by: Ace at 11:41 AM | Add Comment
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Ouch, because it's true.

It's an NRO exclusive, so I don't want to steal too much but here's a taste of John Bolton's reaction to Obama's UN speech.

“It was a very naïve, Wilsonian speech, and very revealing of Obama’s foreign policy,” says Bolton. “Overall, it was so apologetic for the actions of prior administrations, in an effort to distance Obama from them, that it became yet another symbol of American weakness in the wake of the president’s decision to abandon missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and his recent manifest hesitation over what to do in Afghanistan.”

Read the whole thing.

The Obama administration reminds me of this quote from The Hunt for Red October, "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it. "

Posted by: DrewM at 10:29 AM | Comments (9)
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Doctor Zero nails it.

First of all, commenters who cautioned CBS is cutting this for maximum impact; you don't know the context were right. There wasn't any verbal context to save the remark. But there was a lot of non-verbal context. If you watch the clip in full, as Doc Zero says, it's pretty clear 1, Beck is just thinking of this statement even as he says it, 2, he's laughing as he realizes it's provocative and also, maybe, he's pretty unsure of it.

In other words, he's a guy paid to say whatever pops into his mind for three hours at a time, the more provocative, the better, and that's what he did here. A thought popped into his head; he said it.

It doesn't seem to me that this is a thought-out remark or a manifesto. It seems like an idle, interesting thought that drifted into his head, and, as people do, he said it.

Unless he comes out with a well-deliberated restatement and elaboration on the comment, it seems harmless enough. And it doesn't seem to have any larger meaning. People spout off; I sure do. And besides -- as commenters correctly noted -- this was something that was said in anger, frustration, and other states of agitation sixty-eight bazillion times by every other conservative on the planet.

I doubt you could fill a single-subject school notebook with the names of conservatives who didn't say this frustration and out of spite at one time or another. McCain was a lousy candidate, one of the worst we've ever fielded, and just about every conservative in America was befuddled at how, of all the flawed-but-attractive alternatives (including the almost-completely unflawed Fred Thompson) we ended up with perhaps the worst of all candidates.

As an aside, we were all (well, not all: Like eight people supported McCain) so upset by this bizarre state of affairs that we spent an entire month after the election blaming each other's stupidity for allowing this to happen.

So, again, in that context: No big deal. He tossed out an interesting idea. Interesting, primarily, because it was dumb. That is what people do, especially people paid to be interesting above all else. Interesting and dumb trumps boring and right.

Doc Zero also notes that Beck may just be doing the "hey I'm a centrist" act that O'Reilly does:

He might have been looking to stake out some unique, independent ground, in the manner of his Fox associate Bill OÂ’Reilly, who awakens every morning to discover the center of the political universe is planted squarely between his toes.

Of course, O'Reilly seems to be somewhat more plausible on that, as it has dawned on many of us that yes, O'Reilly is playing the pander-about-how-wonderfully-independent-you-are game as usual, but seriously, he doesn't seem to be any kind of principled conservative. He's really a populist who's instincts put him on the left and right on different issues. He tends to be a social con, yes, but on economic issues and on global warming, he's often on the left, because his real politics is just about attacking "the fatcats" to "look out for the folks."

Anyway, Doc Zero then goes on to address Beck's point as if seriously intended (which he doubts), and demolishes it.

Yes, McCain was bad. Yes, McCain would have opposed conservatives on many issues. (I don't say "sell out" because -- give this to McCain -- it's not as if he really tried very hard to deceive us he was ever on his side.)

But just to name one issue, one huge issue: He doesn't care about or really understand economics, so he would not have embarked upon some grand scheme of remaking the country's economics; he would have pursued SOP establishment GOP "crisis economics" of a small (compared to Obama's) stimulus that was heavy on tax cuts and lighter on direct spending.

And he would not have funded every Democratic pet project in a massive trillion dollar bill.

McCain absolutely loathes pork. He talks about pork so much because it's an affront to his sense of integrity and it's one of the few things conservatives agree with him on. And he talks about it because, while he doesn't really understand economics, he grasps pork as a moral issue, an issue of personal honor, which is his primary prism through which he views the world.

So: Stimulus? No. Not like Obama. Sure, a stimulus -- the GOP was generally in favor of some stimulus; a stimulus is an example of "crisis economics," when all politicians succumb to the notion that whether they are helping things or not, they must be perceived as doing something, anything, to help. So absolutely, he would have supported some stimulus, as every other GOP candidate (except Ron -- I mean Doctor -- Paul) would have.

What he argued for on the Senate floor is pretty much what he would have championed. Something like $400 billion, with a bit less than half directed towards tax cuts, some aid to states, and some targeted spending.

Right there is he is different and is better than Obama. Even if you think that McCain's stimulus still would have been bad, you can't really argue it wouldn't have at least been better.

And on foreign policy? Ask Honduras, Afghanistan, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the murdered protesters in Teheran about that.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (1)
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Sweet Sassy Molassy.

"Don't hate my father," Mackenzie Phillips tells PEOPLE.

But in a tell-all book out Wednesday, the former childhood actress reveals that her dad, musician John Phillips of the '60s band the Mamas and the Papas, engaged with her in a long-term incestuous relationship.

...

"On the eve of my wedding, my father showed up, determined to stop it," writes Phillips, who was 19 and a heavy drug user at the time. "I had tons of pills, and Dad had tons of everything too. Eventually I passed out on Dad's bed."

"My father was not a man with boundaries. He was full of love, and he was sick with drugs. I woke up that night from a blackout to find myself having sex with my own father."

"Had this happened before? I didn't know. All I can say is it was the first time I was aware of it."

"My father was not a man with boundaries." That's a nice way to put it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:00 AM | Comments (6)
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How else to explain this statement?

I know you agreed to do 80 billion and I know you were willing to help support through an advertising campaign this particular — not even this particular bill, just the idea of generic health care reform?

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:51 AM | Add Comment
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Such is Rachel Maddow's thesis about calling Obama Hitler.

Enjoy her pontificate on the "dog whistles" and deliberate, knowing incitement towards political violence as you watch dozens of Bush = Hitler signs.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:44 AM | Comments (1)
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It's hard to capture how spectacularly cynical and dishonest the Democrats have been on "the war of necessity," but Rich Lowry gets a good swing at it.

At the height of their anti-Iraq War fever, Democrats accused Pres. George W. Bush of cooking up the war for political reasons. It must have been their guilty consciences speaking.

Democrats are the party of extreme situational politics on national security. Almost every major Democrat with presidential aspirations voted to authorize the Iraq War, then turned on it. As the Iraq War spiraled downward, many Democrats called for more troops, then resisted the surge. It has practically been mandatory for all good, card-carrying Democrats to trumpet the centrality of the Afghan War since 2003, using it as a rhetorical club to attack President BushÂ’s focus on Iraq. Now that it is crunch time in Afghanistan, theyÂ’ve gone from resolute to flaccid.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t “think there’s a great deal of support for sending more troops.” Once upon a time, she insisted, “We need to finish the job.” Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is touting an implausible plan to train the Afghan army without any more American troops. Forgotten are the days when he browbeat Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for a failure to provide “the kind of commitment of forces or resources that our commanders on the ground are asking us for.” And John Kerry, who used to be as gung-ho as John Wayne in The Green Berets, now sounds ready to revert to his usual martial role of leading the political charge toward defeat.

And then he gets on to Obama.

The Weekly Standard's blog is howling over this in every third post or so, and it is a "keep on scrolling" sort of thing. But to digest:

Carl Levin claims Gen. McChrystal's blistering report on the necessity of additional troops (as Candidate Obama promised) says the complete opposite and in fact claims that troop levels are irrelevant.

Iran's Qods Force training/supplying Taliban.

Obama Administration is treating McChrystal's blunt assessment as so nuanced as to require weeks of review to comprehend his subtle points. Most people would call this "stalling for time" and "ducking the issue."

Steny Hoyer agrees with John Boehner that MacChrystal should testify before Congress.

And so on.

Some have suggested that perhaps Afghanistan is not winnable, or, maybe, not worth winning, in the sense that manpower required to turn this backwards country into something worthy. At The Corner, isolationist (which is not meant derogatorily) Derbyshire wonders why it is we need to rebuild these countries at all -- "if you broke it, you bought it" -- and why we cannot simply invade briefly, kill as many of the leaders as possible, and abandon the countries to their own violent means of working things out post-invasion.

I have to say I often wonder about this myself -- a country like Iraq or Afghanistan is going to have a long, violent struggle due to a sudden power vacuum; is it truly necessary that US troops be involved in the bloodshed?

Nevertheless, even if it were true that post-invasion/power-vacuum violence is more or less inevitable and US troops can only reduce this by a small amount, this seems to be a fantasy solution to me. Yes, we can discuss, as a purely academic question, whether or not it makes sense to let God, and their own determination to purge and kill, sort out who has won and who has been murdered. But the US consensus ethic on this is currently overwhelming: The US, rightly or wrongly, must step in and repair the countries it smashes, at least until there is a change in what we consider the ethics of warfare.

I might be willing to sign up for a policy of benevolent neglect, or cruel-to-be-kind, going forward. Going forward. But at the moment it seems that anytime we leave a place in a greater state of chaos and misery than we found it in, we have "lost" that war, in our own imaginations as well as in the imaginations of our enemies.

Furthermore, while I think this is a perfectly reasonable proposition to debate in the abstract, we cannot overlook the fact that we have made certain commitments in Afghanistan, and we have staked the success of the anti-terror war on purging the Taliban from Afghanistan.

And perhaps even more important: While I am even more ignorant than most on the situation in Afghanistan and what would be needed to win, I am not ignorant about Obama, and I do not trust the man's judgment to make a decision in America's true interest.

What I expect him to do is to make a judgment in his own political interest, whether it's in America's interest or not, and nod towards the Derbyshire-style "More Rubble, Less Trouble" line of thinking because it's expedient for him to do so and at this point he needs to give The Left the victory they most crave, an American defeat.

The political deck, it seems to me, is stacked very much in favor of surrender and defeat in Afghanistan, because that is what Obama's all about.

Incidentally, if Obama does hand Afghanistan back into the tender mercies of the enemy which must be defeated, at least a year ago, I expect him to hand the entire country over to handmaidens of 9/11, and not even attempt the decency of a partition so that the non-Pashtuns do not have to become the slaves of the Taliban-supporting Pashtuns once again.

Why artificial boundaries are more important than a people's right to self-determination and to be free of the tyranny of a larger, more violent, more Taliban tribe is quite beyond me, but I'm sure it's all in the interests of multiculturalism that our allies in the Northern Alliance of non-Pashtun tribes must accept the Taliban yoke once more.

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (1)
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