Friday, August 29, 2008
A Speech to the Delegates
My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year’s “American Idol.”
One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.
We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn’t about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It’s about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that’s where all his accomplishments are.
We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn’t extend back past Coke Zero.
We meet today to heal the divisions that have torn this country. For we are all one country and one American family, whether we are caring and thoughtful Democrats or hate-filled and war-crazed Republicans. We must bring together left and right, marinara and carbonara, John and Elizabeth Edwards. On United we stand, on US Airways, there’s a 25-minute delay.
Ladies and gentleman, I never expected to be speaking before you today. Like so many of our speakers at this convention, I come from a hard-working, middle-class family. I was leading a miserable little life, but, nevertheless, overcame great odds to live the American Dream. My great-grandfather fought in Patton’s Army, along with Barack Obama’s great-grand uncles’ fourth cousin once removed.
As a child, I was abandoned by my parents and lived with a colony of ants. We didn’t have much in the way of material possession, but we did have each other and the ability to carry far more than our own body weights. When I was young, I was temporarily paralyzed in a horrible anteater accident, but I never gave up my dream: the dream of speaking at a national political convention so my speech could be talked over by Wolf Blitzer and a gang of pundits.
And today we Democrats meet in Denver, a suburb of Boulder, a city whose motto is, “A Taxi? You Must be Dreaming.”
And in Denver, we Democrats showed America that we have cute daughters who will someday provide us with prestigious car-window stickers. We heard Hillary Clinton’s ringing endorsement of “the weak-looking thin guy who’s bound to lose.”
We heard from Joe Biden, whose 643 years in the Senate make him uniquely qualified to talk to the middle class, whose family has been riding the Acela and before that the Metroliner for generations, who has been given a lifetime ban from the quiet car and who is himself a verbal train wreck waiting to happen.
We got to know Barack and Michelle Obama, two tall, thin, rich, beautiful people who don’t perspire, but who nonetheless feel compassion for their squatter and smellier fellow citizens. We know that Barack could have gone to a prestigious law firm, like his big donors in the luxury boxes, but he chose to put his ego aside to become a professional politician, president of the United States and redeemer of the human race. We heard about his time as a community organizer, the three most fulfilling months of his life.
We were thrilled by his speech in front of the Greek columns, which were conscientiously recycled from the concert, “Yanni, Live at the Acropolis.” We were honored by his pledge, that if elected president, he will serve at least four months before running for higher office. We were moved by his campaign slogan, “Vote Obama: He’s better than you’ll ever be.” We were inspired by dozens of Democratic senators who declared their lifelong love of John McCain before denouncing him as a reactionary opportunist who would destroy the country.
No, this country cannot afford to elect John Bushmccain. Under Republican rule, locusts have stripped the land, adults wear crocs in public and M&M’s have lost their flavor. We must instead ride to the uplands of hope!
For as Barack Obama suggested Thursday night, wherever there is a president who needs to tap our natural-gas reserves, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a need for a capital-gains readjustment for targeted small businesses, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a president committed to direct diplomacy with nuclear proliferators, I’ll be there, too! God bless the Democrats, and God Bless America!
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Reaction to Obama speech
What it didn’t do, though, was answer the basic question the McCain campaign has worked to plant in voters’ minds: what makes this guy think he’s qualified and ready to be president? If the question has really sunk in, Obama is in no less trouble than he was before this convention, and the Republican convention—where McCain’s readiness and experience will be front and center—will do him real harm. But if it hasn’t, and if what people basically want is to get away from the Bush administration, he has certainly given them a reason to see him as their guy.
Obama: "This election is not about me. It's about you." Is Obama breaking up with us?
Obama: "A Promise is the Only Reason I'm Standing Here." Well, it's certainly not because of his qualifications or experience.
Jimmy Carter - "this black boy"
Jimmy Carter called Barack Obama a "black boy" during a chat with Jim Lehrer.
JIMMY CARTER: Around the world. Around the world. And I think it already has sent a wave of approbation and admiration in many countries around the world, just knowing that this black boy who grew up with just a loving mother and grandparents — and that was about all he had to start with — does now have a chance to become the nominee of the Democratic Party for president.
JIMMY CARTER: Around the world. Around the world. And I think it already has sent a wave of approbation and admiration in many countries around the world, just knowing that this black boy who grew up with just a loving mother and grandparents — and that was about all he had to start with — does now have a chance to become the nominee of the Democratic Party for president.
U2 is not enough to close Obama's TV deal
Over the past few days, watching the TV coverage from Denver has been a fascinating experience, especially those long reports that attempt to answer the question, "Who is Barack Obama?" Each piece includes much coverage of his campaign, and what has struck me is that there's a distinctive soundtrack. It's U2. Always U2.
Early in his campaign, Obama chose U2's City of Blinding Lights as a campaign song. Later, when he'd won the nomination, and when he appeared recently with Senator Joe Biden, it was U2's Beautiful Day that boomed out at the public events.
Of course, all of these events are choreographed for a TV audience. The point is to get the clip, the report, on the TV news and use it as a commercial-by-proxy. Like any powerful commercial, the act of selling Obama and his message must have a catchy or uplifting musical accompaniment.
There's nothing casual about Obama's use of U2. If you go to the Internet to sites devoted to supporters of Obama, you'll find a subgroup called U2 Fans for Obama '08. And that group's mission statement is this: "Since Bono can't run for U.S. president, Obama is the next best thing. A group for those of us who see in Obama a progressive Christian who embodies the ideas and sentiments we find so compelling in U2's music."
Me, I find it unnerving...
The thing is, the power of the music is in its vagueness. It's about yearning, not achievement. It articulates aching needs. It is simultaneously all-meaningful and meaningless. As a selling tool, it's too vague. Beautiful Day is as powerful at a World Cup soccer game as it is at an Obama rally.
If it is used tonight, Obama is still only selling yearning, and he's not closing the deal. Like anyone selling something, he's got to be more concrete, to deal with the stony ground. Beautiful Day opens with "The heart is a bloom/ shoots up through the stony ground" and it's on the stony ground that elections are won. I don't think U2 closes the sale.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Obama’s Friend, America’s Enemy
Have you ever been a friend or business associate of a terrorist? Not someone who, to your shock and horror, turned out secretly to have bombed government buildings. No, the question is whether you’ve ever befriended an unreconstructed radical whose past was well known to you when you entered his orbit and walked through doors he opened for you. Have you been chummy with an unapologetic terrorist who, years after you’d known and worked closely with him, was still telling the New York Times he regretted only failing to carry out more attacks — and that America still “makes me want to puke”?
Barack Obama has.
An organization called the American Issues Project, backed by Dallas investor Harold Simmons, is running a campaign ad which highlights Obama’s troubling relationship with William Ayers. Ayers is a former member of the Weathermen terrorist organization that bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, various police headquarters, and other targets in the early 1970s.
The Obama campaign’s rejoinder is three-pronged: The first shot was an Obama response ad, which fails to offer any substantive explanation of why Obama maintains ties to Ayers. Obama’s second move was to launch a heavy-handed effort to pressure television stations into rejecting the ad by promising financial retaliation against the stations and their advertisers — which effort has apparently succeeded in intimidating Fox and CNN. The capper is a desperate call for the Justice Department to muzzle political speech through the prospect of a criminal investigation — a demand that provides a disturbing sneak peak into what life would be like under an Obama Justice Department.
Needless to say, none of this is justified. If Obama has a good explanation for his ties to Ayers, he ought to give it. In the meantime, raising questions about that relationship is entirely legitimate.
Obama’s campaign has acknowledged that the candidate and Ayers are friends. Though Obama has more recently minimized Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” it is clear that the relationship was much deeper than that. Ayers and his fellow-terrorist wife, Bernadine Dohrn (who has spoken admiringly of the infamous Manson Family murders), are icons in Chicago’s hard-left circles, to which Obama sought entrée as a young “community organizer.” In 1995, they hosted a fundraiser that helped launch his career in Chicago politics.
Ayers has never abandoned his indictment of America as an imperialist hotbed of racism and economic exploitation. He has merely shifted methods from violent extortion to academic indoctrination. Through his perch as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, he has been a ceaseless critic of the criminal-justice system (he is essentially opposed to imprisoning even the most violent criminals) and a proponent of what he calls “education reform” but what is actually the use of the classroom to proselytize for the Left’s political agenda.
Writing in the Chicago Tribune in 1997, Obama called A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers’ polemic on the Chicago court system, “a searing and timely account.” Michelle Obama, then a dean at the University of Illinois, invited Ayers to participate in a panel with her husband, then a state senator who, the program explained, was “working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system.”
Obama apologists dismiss all this as “guilt by association” based on a single joint appearance. But it was far from the only one.
In fact, by 1997 Obama and Ayers were collaborators on a far more significant level. They sat together for several years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing Chicago charitable organization. There, they doled out tens of thousands of dollars to such beneficiaries as the Trinity Church (where Obama was a longtime member and where another Obama mentor, Jeremiah Wright, preached a radical, anti-American brand of Black Liberation Theology) and the Arab American Action Network (co-founded by Rashid Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat apologist who has supported attacks against Israel and now directs Columbia University’s notorious Middle East Institute, founded by Edward Said).
Even more intriguing, in 1995 Ayers won a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation — matched two-to-one by public and private contributions — to promote “reform” in the Chicago school system. He quickly brought in Obama, then all of 33 and bereft of any executive experience, to chair the board. With Ayers directing the project’s operational arm and Obama overseeing its financial affairs until 1999, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge distributed more than $100 million to ideological allies with no discernible improvement in public education.
Until this week, moreover, the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers works, was blocking access to the project’s files (examination of which was being sought by frequent National Review contributor Stanley Kurtz), until finally relenting under public pressure. Less than three months from Election Day, analysis of the records from Barack Obama’s only significant executive experience is just beginning.
The mainstream media has been derelict on the Obama/Ayers relationship. Perhaps now, finally, it will get the scrutiny it deserves.
Barack Obama has.
An organization called the American Issues Project, backed by Dallas investor Harold Simmons, is running a campaign ad which highlights Obama’s troubling relationship with William Ayers. Ayers is a former member of the Weathermen terrorist organization that bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, various police headquarters, and other targets in the early 1970s.
The Obama campaign’s rejoinder is three-pronged: The first shot was an Obama response ad, which fails to offer any substantive explanation of why Obama maintains ties to Ayers. Obama’s second move was to launch a heavy-handed effort to pressure television stations into rejecting the ad by promising financial retaliation against the stations and their advertisers — which effort has apparently succeeded in intimidating Fox and CNN. The capper is a desperate call for the Justice Department to muzzle political speech through the prospect of a criminal investigation — a demand that provides a disturbing sneak peak into what life would be like under an Obama Justice Department.
Needless to say, none of this is justified. If Obama has a good explanation for his ties to Ayers, he ought to give it. In the meantime, raising questions about that relationship is entirely legitimate.
Obama’s campaign has acknowledged that the candidate and Ayers are friends. Though Obama has more recently minimized Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” it is clear that the relationship was much deeper than that. Ayers and his fellow-terrorist wife, Bernadine Dohrn (who has spoken admiringly of the infamous Manson Family murders), are icons in Chicago’s hard-left circles, to which Obama sought entrée as a young “community organizer.” In 1995, they hosted a fundraiser that helped launch his career in Chicago politics.
Ayers has never abandoned his indictment of America as an imperialist hotbed of racism and economic exploitation. He has merely shifted methods from violent extortion to academic indoctrination. Through his perch as a professor of education at the University of Illinois, he has been a ceaseless critic of the criminal-justice system (he is essentially opposed to imprisoning even the most violent criminals) and a proponent of what he calls “education reform” but what is actually the use of the classroom to proselytize for the Left’s political agenda.
Writing in the Chicago Tribune in 1997, Obama called A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers’ polemic on the Chicago court system, “a searing and timely account.” Michelle Obama, then a dean at the University of Illinois, invited Ayers to participate in a panel with her husband, then a state senator who, the program explained, was “working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system.”
Obama apologists dismiss all this as “guilt by association” based on a single joint appearance. But it was far from the only one.
In fact, by 1997 Obama and Ayers were collaborators on a far more significant level. They sat together for several years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing Chicago charitable organization. There, they doled out tens of thousands of dollars to such beneficiaries as the Trinity Church (where Obama was a longtime member and where another Obama mentor, Jeremiah Wright, preached a radical, anti-American brand of Black Liberation Theology) and the Arab American Action Network (co-founded by Rashid Khalidi, a Yasser Arafat apologist who has supported attacks against Israel and now directs Columbia University’s notorious Middle East Institute, founded by Edward Said).
Even more intriguing, in 1995 Ayers won a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation — matched two-to-one by public and private contributions — to promote “reform” in the Chicago school system. He quickly brought in Obama, then all of 33 and bereft of any executive experience, to chair the board. With Ayers directing the project’s operational arm and Obama overseeing its financial affairs until 1999, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge distributed more than $100 million to ideological allies with no discernible improvement in public education.
Until this week, moreover, the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers works, was blocking access to the project’s files (examination of which was being sought by frequent National Review contributor Stanley Kurtz), until finally relenting under public pressure. Less than three months from Election Day, analysis of the records from Barack Obama’s only significant executive experience is just beginning.
The mainstream media has been derelict on the Obama/Ayers relationship. Perhaps now, finally, it will get the scrutiny it deserves.
The Denver Dems Aren’t Making the Sale
There is no Biden bounce according to the latest Gallup tracking poll, as John McCain actually is taking a 46-44 lead over Barack Obama. Scott Rasmussen reports a 46-46 tie after the Democratic National Convention’s first night, which reverses a 3 percentage point Obama lead.
Meanwhile, another Gallup poll says 50 percent expect their taxes to be raised under Obama, despite the complaints of his economic advisors that they’re only raising taxes on the top few percent.
Make no mistake about it: There are many doubts and unanswered questions about the Illinois senator regarding his experience, his foreign policy, his economics, and his prior political and spiritual relationships. And despite some good moments last night, I don’t think Michelle Obama made the sale. At the end, only her husband can do it. Hillary can’t do it. If the badly split Democrats can be united at this late date, only Obama can do the job. No one else.
Reagan united a split GOP in 1980. George W. Bush united the McCain, Forbes, and cultural-conservative factions in 2000. Goldwater couldn’t do it in ’64. Neither could Humphrey in ’68. Of course, Jerry Ford couldn’t do it in ’76. And Carter failed dismally in 1980. But Bill Clinton succeeded in 1992.
Now it’s Obama’s task in 2008. That’s his job. No one else can do it for him.
And as the stock market looks on warily, falling slightly today after plunging yesterday, the lead story in this morning’s Wall Street Journal is a serious indictment of Obama’s economic program. “Senator Obama is proposing to use the government to remake economic policies in a way that hasn’t been seen in Washington in decades.” And if it’s a three-house Dem sweep, it will be Katy bar the door. Big-government spending programs, tax increases, trade restraints, a government health-care plan, cap-and-trade on climate change — all without any real deficit restraints, which are accorded a low priority.
Incidentally, while the public clamors for drill, drill, drill, Obama wants high-cost, cap-and-trade carbon regulation enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, McCain also wants cap-and-trade, but not if India and China don’t go along. Apparently Obama will not be constrained by the rest of the world.
Sure, the economy is languishing. But do we really want a big-government, high-tax solution? Do we really want higher investment taxes that would leave government bigger and private enterprise smaller? Do Americans really blame “rich” people? Or do they actually believe success is a good thing and should not be punished? Do rank-and-file working folks really want to do away with the secret ballot for unionization in the form of the so-called card check? And if there were a three-house Dem sweep, wouldn’t Obama’s middle-class tax credit be overturned in favor of even more government spending, just as Bill Clinton’s plans were subverted back in 1993? The National Taxpayers Union says Obama’s new spending would total $344 billion. That’s a big number. One has to wonder if that’s the opening bid or the final one.
The Obama economists sincerely believe that theirs is a growth program. His advisors are friends of mine — all of them terribly smart: Jason Furman, Austan Goolsbee, Robert Reich, Jarrod Bernstein. So this is surely not personal on my part. But I question their economic model. Raising marginal tax rates will minimize — not maximize — economic growth and jobs. Ditto for enlarging the size, scope, and sweep of government.
Business cycles come and go. Each has its own set of excesses and subsequent corrections. It is the nature of free-market capitalism. But heavy-handed government solutions are being rejected worldwide, and it seems foolhardy for the USA to move away from economic freedom when virtually the rest of the world is moving toward it.
One of the greatest tax reformers of all time was John F. Kennedy. He slashed marginal tax rates across the board for businesses and people of all income levels. The economy boomed in the 1960s. Reagan copied the JFK model in the 1980s. Are we turning back this supply-side model? I fear the Obama men are doing just that. I think that fear is worrying the stock market right now.
John McCain’s economic program is certainly not flawless. And his ad bashing business, oil, and others nearly reaches the class-warfare level of Obama-Biden. It’s a Big Mac mistake. Nor does McCain have a solid tax-cutting program for the middle class. More on all that later.
But as the Democrats discuss the economy tonight, I’m willing to bet they are not gonna make the sale. Obama’s task Thursday night will be a monumental challenge.
Scott Redd Appointed to Professor of O.T. Position
Utah Utes vs. Michigan Wolverines
Saturday, August 30
3:30 p.m. EDT
Michigan Stadium
Ann Arbor, Mich.
Television: ABC
Radio: Michigan Sports Network | Stations
Live Stats | Ticket information
Game Notes
Utah Utes (0-0, 0-0 MWC) utahutes.com
Roster | Schedule/Results | Statistics (2007) | Media Guide
Michigan Wolverines (0-0, 0-0 Big Ten) MGoBlue.com
Roster | Schedule/Results | Statistics (2007) | Media Guide
All-time Series: U-M leads, 1-0
Last meeting: U-M 10, Utah 7 (09/21/02, Ann Arbor)
• Michigan Record Book: Part 1 | Part 2
• Big Ten: Releases | Schedule
• NCAA Statistics
Michigan Notes:
- Rich Rodriguez will coach his first game for Michigan. He is 8-6-1 in his previous 15 home openers. He will be the 18th coach in the school's history and 11th since 1901.
- Wolverine coaches have accumulated a 15-2 record in their debuts.
- U-M is 106-17-2 in home openers and has won 13 of 15 season openers at the Big House. It's last loss was against Appalachian St. in 2007.
- Michigan is 3-1 against schools that currently make up the MWC.
AP:
ESPN: Preview | Scouts Preview
ESPN: Michigan Clubhouse
Yahoo!: Michigan Team Page
Detroit Free-Press: Michigan Team Page
Detroit News: Michigan Clubhouse
Sports Illustrated: Michigan Wolverines
Big Ten Network: Michigan Wolverines
Michigan Stats
- Michigan is #32 in the AP Poll, #24 in the USA Today Coaches' Poll, #36 in the ESPN Power Rankings, #54 in the Sports Illustrated Ranking and #18 in the Sporting News rankings
- Michigan has more wins that any football program in NCAA history, 869.
- Michigan has the highest winning percentage of any team in NCAA history 869-286-36 (.745).
- Michigan ranks #1 all-time in composite AP final football polls (1936-2006)
- Michigan has 42 Big 10 titles which is the most conference titles of any NCAA school and is 461-166-18 in Big 10 play.
- Michigan has the most weekly appearances in the AP poll, appearing 748 times. They have finished in the top 25 54 times and Top 10 37 times since its inception in 1936
- Michigan has led the nation in attendance 33 of the last 34 years
- Michigan has had 208 consecutive crowds of 100,000+ fan at "The Big House" - a streak started Nov. 8, 1975
- Michigan has compiled a 373-109-15 record at "The Big House"
- Michigan has appeared in 33 straight bowls, the longest current streak in NCAA history.
- 382 Michigan football games have been televised (257-117-8).
- The Michigan football program is the only Big 10 team in any sport to win a conference title in each decade. It is the winningest overall athletic program in Big 10 Conference history
- Michigan has appeared in more Rose Bowls (20) than any other Big 10 Conference school
- Michigan has 11 national championships (5th all-time) to OSU's 7
- Head coach Rich Rodriguez has a career winning percentage of .627 (105-62-2). He was 60-26 (.698) as the head coach of West Virginia.
- He is 25-8 against regular season non-conference foes during his Division I career.
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Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
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