Quote of the Day
No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars
or sailed to an uncharted land
or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
Helen Keller
Post Published Earlier Today
Over the past several months, I have watched with dismay as various candidates have sought election as the non-Romney candidate: Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich and Santorum. Only Perry has any meaningful public sector administrative experience, and he had a brain freeze on naming his third target Cabinet target for elimination/merge. Is there no talent in the GOP ranks? Well, you have superbly qualified current/ex governors like Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Tim Pawlenty, and Bobby Jindal.
If someone had asked after the mid-terms, with the House GOP's enjoying their best showing against Dems in literally several decades, whether I thought Obama is vulnerable, I think the answer would be obvious. What's even worse for Obama is the fact he didn't even try to co-opt the GOP, e.g., with a 2% across-the-board spending cut, drop the controversial health care mandate, etc. The point is, there should have been a flood of GOP candidates waiting to take Obama on.
Instead, we have had this weird campaign where we've been discussing stuff like Gardasil, moon bases, public bets, etc. Now, granted, the candidates don't choose questions asked during the debates (and it's possible these questions were asked and I didn't hear the question), but I would have liked to hear the candidates respond to open-ended questions: e.g., "What have we learned from the Iraq experience? What would you have done differently?", "Would you replace ObamaCare with a catastrophic health plan? What is your answer to the problem of bankruptcies due to medical expenses? How would you fund it?", "Do you intend to reform the military retirement system? How?" or "Should the TSA be abolished?"
In particular, I would have asked them about the fact of Congress' low approval ratings, what they think needs to be done to respond to Americans' concerns that the country is headed in the wrong direction. I would ask them what they see as the most important criteria for electing a President: executive experience? Policy expertise? Federal government experience? Leadership or negotiation skills? Foreign affairs? Why do you want to be President? Can you give us an example of when you've exercised Presidential-style leadership?
I wrote a standalone post earlier today, where I explain my own political migration and briefly give an overview of a proposed new political party idea, which I call the Liberty Conservative Party.
A TSA Workaround?
TSA critic and blogger/engineer Jonathan Corbett showed a simple workaround to screening procedures that he developed, using a side pocket to hide a metallic object not detected by full-body scanners (because the objects blend against a dark background). (The new technology doesn't provide old metallic detection technology.)
It's remarkable how even adversaries with limited budgets can devise inexpensive decoys or workarounds to defeat formidable extraordinarily expensive weapon systems.
Obama College Tapes?
Good grief! The much-hyped Breitbart tape shows Harvard law student Barack Obama introducing and embracing Harvard law school African American professor Derrick Bell. A black law student actually met one of the few African American law professors? Say it ain't so, Joe! Granted, Professor Bell is very controversial, but this is hardly a smoking gun. (What would be what I consider a smoking gun would be proof that Obama had been secretly ghostwriting Bell's controversial writings.)
This sort of thing reminds me of Dan Rather's attempt during the 2004 campaign to expose allegations made over George W. Bush's National Guard service, which turned out to be poorly vetted. I can imagine that Sean Hannity was suitably "shocked" when the film was run on his show tonight (which I didn't watch).
I'm sure that my nephews and nieces assure everybody that they aren't responsible for their crazy old uncle's blog commentaries. (Indeed, if they were reading my blog, my pageviews would be much higher...) They probably still love me anyway... The fact that Obama knew or liked an African American professor has no meaning to me. Listen, after Obama and company have already run up a $5T debt, the same amount that Bush added over 8 full years (including bookend recessions), do you really need to go back to Obama's college days to find reasons to vote Obama out of office? After all, Obama admitted to experimenting with illicit drugs while in college, and voters didn't care.
The polemical writeup on the blog asserts that Obama was even closer to Bell than to Jeremiah Wright. The fact of the matter is that it is difficult to find any substantive connection between the rhetoric or writings of the two controversial individuals and Obama's own material. If the "radicals" were so influential, what's the evidence of their influence?
I find myself in the unusual circumstance of having to defend Obama...
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Paul McCartney & Wings, "Getting Closer". "Back to the Egg" at the time seemed the most Beatlesque of the Wings' albums. As I mentioned earlier, this is my second-favorite Wings track. There is something about the driving percussion of many of the songs of this period which I loved, e.g., Linda Ronstadt's "How Do I Make You", Blondie's "Atomic", and the Boss' "Candy's Room" (greatest rock song ever)...
