Obama’s 143 Days of Senate Experience

I have lifted this quote in it’s entirey from The Loft via Tim Blair
Just how much Senate experience does Barack Obama have in terms of actual work days? Not much. From the time Barack Obama was sworn in as a United State Senator, to the time he announced he was forming a Presidential exploratory committee, he logged 143 days of experience in the Senate. That’s how many days the Senate was actually in session and working. After 143 days of work experience, Obama believed he was ready to be Commander In Chief, Leader of the Free World, and fill the shoes of Abraham Lincoln, FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan. 143 days — I keep leftovers in my refrigerator longer than that. In contrast, John McCain’s 26 years in Congress, 22 years of military service including 1,966 days in captivity as a POW in Hanoi now seem more impressive than ever. At 71, John McCain may just be hitting his stride.
Like our own Kevin Rudd, the US Messiah is all talk.

Democrat Convention

I listened to the ABC report on the Democrat Convention in Denver. Michelle Obama spoke but her earlier comment “…first time in my life I’m really been proud to be an American” didn’t get a rerun. Ted Kennedy spoke emotionally and eloquently about the achievements of others – his brother Jack and quoted Martin Luther King’s I have a dream but he didn’t mention Chappaquiddick Understandable too, but some people have long memories and if I was Obama I would just as soon not have Ted’s support. I wonder if the ABC will give the Republican Convention to be held next week, the same sort of coverage.

I’ll vote for him but he’s still a liar

The BBC, ever ready to publish something anti-Republican, have dug up the Head Jailer at the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War where John McCain was incarcerated after having to eject from his jet. It now appears that after all this time they were actually the best of mates and the North Vietnamese were nice chaps.
“McCain is my friend,” said 75-year-old Mr Duyet as he feeds the caged birds he now keeps in his garden in this coastal city. “If I was American, I would vote for him.”
but;
“…. I can confirm to you that we never tortured him. We never tortured any prisoners.”
Besides lying about being tortured then, McCain is still lying;
“But I can somehow sympathise with him. He lies to American voters in order to get their support for his presidential election.”
You have to give it to the BBC; they start the article with ‘I would vote for him’ and from that point on ‘McCain’s a lying hound’ Didn’t torture prisoners….yeah right.

US politics

On the US political front a new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study of Iraq has said 600,000 died post invasion and Barbara Striesand screams “shut the f***k up to a heckler complaining about a skit during her show that depicted Bush as a bumbling idiot. Maybe if she had stated at the start “This is a free Democrat Party election advertisement” then the heckler would’ve had nothing to complain about. She added “Shut up if you can’t take a joke!” It’s not funny Barbara and you’re not a commedienne, or a believable political commentator for that matter, so just stick to singing. The Iraq deaths, a statistical extrapolation from approximately 40,000 known dead has been gleefully reported by the Tehran Times and is so blatantly released in time for the 7 Nov elections that I’m surprised it gets any oxygen from the general media. Our ABC, of course, are all over it.

Democrat’s wish list

Sex scandal threatens to sink Republicans The Times reports
THE iron grip with which Republicans have held the House of Representatives for the past 12 years appears looser by the day with each fresh disclosure in the sex scandal involving Congressman Mark Foley and teenage boys working on Capitol Hill.
and quotes a pollster.
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, predicted yesterday that the mid-terms are set to mirror those of 1994 when Democrats were swept from power by a wave of voter anger. He said: “I watched something similar happen in 1997 when Tony Blair’s Labour Party won its landslide against the Conservatives. The Republicans are sinking fast.”
I’m not convinced. When the story first broke I surfed around to get some idea of the severity of Foley’s crimes and stumbled across Tim Dunlops “Road to Surfdom Hysteria” I followed a link from this line “The emails are stomach-turning: you can see them here. I followed the link anticipating hot flushes, nausea and the development of a burning desire to kill the nearest paedophile. I was dissapointed. I read them again…well, they are creepy in a “send me a picture of yourself” and “what would you like for a birthday present” sort of way but the hysteria eluded me. Tim Blair quotes Kerry Howley at Reason on Line who says
The Mark Foley pedophilia sex scandal lacks two things: pedophilia and sex.
I would hope that Foley’s’ public office’ days are over, he apparently has a track record of bothering Pages and comes across as creepy and immature, but if it reflects significantly on the Republican vote I’ll be surprised. The “holier than thou” hypocritical reaction of the Democrats lacks substance in the light of actualy having sex with an intern (Clinton); get drunk, crash a car into the water and leave the passenger to drown (Kennedy); and actually having sex with a 17 yr old male page (Studds) to name just a few transgressions. Casualties so far;
Foley’s has resigned,
The chief of staff for Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, Kirk Fordham, has resigned after questions were raised about his role in the handling of the congressional page scandal, and Speaker of the House Hastert is under pressure but will most probably survive.
One for being stupid and weird and two for keeping the fact under wraps. That should be it and if pundits are predictng the collapse of the Republican Party over one bad apple then they need some history lessons.  People in glass houses…….etc

AWB Fiasco III

Greg Sheridan in the Australian.
I THINK it’s time we all took a cold shower on AWB (formerly the Australian Wheat Board) and its participation in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. According to the Volcker inquiry, about 2253 companies from 66 countries were involved in paying kickbacks to the Saddam Hussein regime as part of their trade under oil-for-food.
My thoughts exactly. If you do business in this part of the world you pay bakshees. If you don’t pay you don’t sell. Would ‘Tricky’ Rudd or Beasley have compensated the thousands of Australian wheat growers for loss of sales if the crop stayed in the bins? No way. Australians see that it’s all about the ALP trying to score a strike against the government; that the government most probably didn’t know about the details of the case and that after all, the AWB did what it was chartered to do – sell the wheat crop in extremely difficult circumstances. As well as getting money to the wheat growers for their efforts they most probably saved lives in Iraq. Kids had food for a change. I guess that in the total absence of any coherent policies the ALP can not hope to win power; they can only hope to bring the government down by a technicality.
The broader question of corruption is very slippery. When people are accused of corruption, this normally means acting dishonestly, stealing money for themselves. Many people connected to the UN, such as Kofi Annan’s son Koji, made a lot of money personally through oil-for-food. No one is alleging that folks at AWB were improperly pocketing money themselves.
It’s not about the AWB, they are just the catalyst for the ALP to attack. There will be any amount of Australian companys who will have paid ‘fees’ to get goods over the wharves in Indonesia, through customs in some South African excuse for a country or even into a European market. It just happens and the only difference is the actual word used to describe the ‘fees’. In fact, if any company tells you they don’t pay ‘fees’ to get goods into Indonesia I would say they are telling porkies. The ABC, SBS and ALP should get over it and start acting as a constructive opposition. There are plenty of bills to debate and the AWB will not cost Howard any votes.

Bush bugging beatup

Mark Steyn hits the nail on the head.
….unmoored from reality, wafting happily into fantasy land safe in the hermetically sealed Democrat-media bubble, Sen. Barbara Boxer and her colleagues are apparently considering impeaching the president for eavesdropping on al Qaida calls made to U.S. phone numbers.
It’s the same as taking Churchill or Roosevelt to court over their complicity in breaking Enigma and the Japanese codes and then conducting the mortal sin of listening in to the enemies communications. More from Steyn.
Consider Iyman Faris, a naturalized American citizen also known as Mohammad Rauf and nailed by U.S. intelligence through the interception of foreign-U.S. communications. He was convicted in 2003 for doing the legwork on an al Qaida scheme to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge Do you want Iyman Faris in jail? Or do you think he should have the run of the planet until he’s actually destroyed the bridge and killed hundreds of people? Say, the Golden Gate Bridge just as you’re driving across after voting for Barbara Boxer and congratulating yourself on your moral superiority.
If you do want him, and others like him off the streets then you need to accept that one of the quickest avenues of doing so is communications interception. You can’t have it both ways. I recommend you read the full article. The link is in the RH bar

Honour and Honesty ‘Deep Throated”

The daughter of the former FBI agent who was revealed this week as Deep Throat has acknowledged that money played a role in the family’s decision to go public. Grandson Nick, heads for similar career based on honour and honesty.
“My son, Nick, is in law school and he’ll owe $US100,000 ($A132,500) by the time he graduates,” she said. “I am still a single mum, still supporting them to one degree or another, and I am not ashamed of this.”
Dad’s weak at the moment, let’s go talk to him.
Joan Felt said her father suffered a stroke in 2001 and has undergone surgery for heart problems and a broken hip but is still lucid.
Daughter gets him in a weak moment and now he believes that he was a hero.
“We had to help him see that most of the world now considers what he did heroic,” she said. “At the time it was happening, he wouldn’t have gotten that percentage of support, but history has shown it was so important what he did.”
I’m no fan of Tricky Dicky but I am of institutions, Official Secrets Acts and outwardly (at least) apolitical Public Servants and holders of high office. Doubtful motivation to the end.

Bush goes to college

As reported in this post President Bush was scheduled to addresses the graduating class at Calvin College at Grand Rapids, Michegan. Yesterday he did the deed and in doing so, failed miserable in politicising the event as forecast be the MSM and certain left-wing pundits He urged the graduates to consider service to the community in their post-grad lives, saying;
This isn’t a Democratic idea. This isn’t a Republican idea. This is an American idea,”
and
“As your generation takes its place in the world, all of you must make this decision: Will you be a spectator or a citizen?”
He received warm applause but some Democrat voters protested;
Several dozen people (from a student body of over 4,000) protesting outside the event and a few graduates at the ceremony wore stickers that said: “God is not a Republican or Democrat.”
Meanwhile George shows he has a sense of humour with this closing line;
“Some day you will appreciate the grammar and verbal skills you learned here,” quipped the president who is not known for his eloquence. “If any of you wonder how far a mastery of the English language can take you, just look what it did for me.”
On the face of it, the speach sounded like any other graduating day speach. MSM and the left must be so dissappointed.

Bush beat-up

Along the lines of Ripley’s Believe it or Not Tim Dunlop has found a liberal arts educational institution with some staff and students who don’t like Bush!
George Bush, also known as the President, is giving a speech there soon, so you’d expect the usual sort of pro-God, pro-Republican tautological sucking up, right? Well, to the eternal (and I do mean eternal) credit of their faculty and students, not so much:
Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Missouri describes themselves as;
…distinctively Christian, academically excellent liberal arts college that shapes minds for intentional participation in the renewal of all things.
Running Scared posts that one third of the faculty members have signed a political add that will appear in the local rag on the day Bush visits at a cost of $2600 and more than 800 students, faculty and alumni have also placed a political add in the local rag on the same day to the tune of $9,600. Calvin College has 4,300 students so roughly a fifth have been convinced to back some of their teachers in this political exercise. The other 80% might like to ask where the $12,000 is coming from. In this startling, revelationary post Tim has so far established that a percentage of staff and students in a college in the US vote Democrat. As that would be the case on every campus in the country it’s hardly a scoop. I Googled Calvin College+Grand Rapids and studied the College’s website looking for Anti-Bush sentiment. Mmmm…a bit sparse. If Tim and Running Scared are to be believed you would think that if Students, faculty and alumni are forking out over $12,000 it would be all over the website. I did find some negative vibes but hardly a groundswell The front page of the students newsletter, the normal source of campus radical thought, offers little in the way of providing another source for the story. The College President says;
… that the response of alumni to news of the president’s coming has been overwhelmingly positive, although he has had a few alumni who object.
Provost Carpenter says;
In response to rumors of possible protests, [he]… responds that although the event will unavoidably have political dimensions to it, it is “important to be good hosts and to show the personal and institutional maturity of being able to extend hospitality and a civil audience to someone whom we may disagree with.?
No, I don’t know what the appointment ‘Provost’ is either but at least he hints at some political dimension to the visit. It all looks like a couple of bloggers have sat down and thought ‘ How can I put down on Bush today? They should have picked a better example, if there is one. 20% of the student body and one third of the staff disagreeing with Bush’s visit is hardly an election winner.
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