As a Diamondbacks fan, I have to agree with the selection. The D-Backs went from being seemingly doomed to tied with a chance to win it (a chance cashed in by Luis Gonzalez a few batter later).
Terrific job from PJ Media honcho. Best bit is where Senator Lieberman says that his highest duty is not to his party but to the people of Connecticut and the country. Well worth watching!
Predictably, Jane Hamsher reacts by pleading with us conservatives to get with the program and back the Republican in the race, Alan Schlessinger:
So I’ll ask again — is there a reason that you guys are letting Alan Schlessinger flounder? And what’s going to happen the next time an anti-pork, lower taxes candidate wants to take a stand against a Chafee or a Lieberman? Will they look at this race and realize that if the party doesn’t find their values acceptable at the moment, you’re not going to have their back?
It's really simple, Jane. Schlessinger's going to lose. Lieberman is the best we can hope for out of that race. There is no sense backing a loser, as I suspect you'll realize a few election cycles from now.
John Hawkins polled center-right bloggers on the subject of the greatest Americans of all time. The results are here.
Here's my (unranked) list:
George Washington Thomas Jefferson Benjamin Franklin James Madison Ronald Reagan Dwight D. Eisenhower Bud Day Abraham Lincoln Wilbur & Orville Wright Thomas Edison J. Edgar Hoover Todd Beamer Audie Murphy Jimmy Stewart John Adams Sam Adams George W. Bush
The ones who didn't make the list are probably idiosynchratic choices of mine--Audie Murphy, the most decorated WWII soldier; Jimmy Stewart the actor and war hero; Todd Beamer, one of the heroes of Flight 93; and Bud Day, the most decorated soldier alive. J. Edgar Hoover and Sam Adams deserve to be on the list. Looking at the list, the only one that I blew completely was Martin Luther King, Jr. The only one I would disagree with completely is Bill Gates.
"I don't think that there's anyone who grew up around the South that hasn't had the word pass through their lips at one time in their life," he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Tuesday. "If you read 'Fields of Fire,' that word and a lot of other words are in the book." "Fields of Fire" is a novel Webb wrote about the Vietnam War.
Spokeswoman Kristian Denny Todd said Webb, an author and former Marine, "did not want to make any blanket statements that he has never, ever uttered the word. Jim has not used the word directed at another person. He's never used it himself as a racial slur."
But of course, that is precisely what others have claimed George Allen did. However, they have not claimed anything like this:
"They would hop into their cars, and would go down to Watts with these buddies of his," Cragg said Webb told him. "They would take the rifles down there. They would call then [epithets], point the rifles at them, pull the triggers and then drive off laughing. One night, some guys caught them and beat . . . them. And that was the end of that."
Cragg said Webb told him the Watts story during a 1983 interview for a Vietnam veterans magazine. Cragg, who described himself as a Republican who would vote for Allen, did not include the story in his article. He provided a transcript of the interview, but the transcript does not contain the ROTC story. He said he still remembers the exchange vividly more than 20 years later.
My personal hope is that sooner or later this campaign will get off what the two candidates said 20 and 30 years ago.
George Blake, who spied for the Soviet Union, won a human rights claim against the British Government yesterday, 40 years after he escaped from prison in London and fled to Moscow.
Britain was ordered by judges in Strasbourg to pay 84-year-old Blake £3,350 in damages and £1,340 costs for breaching his right to a fair hearing within a reasonable time.
Alright, this is now starting to look like a carefully orchestrated campaign. Get this detail from today's Ryan Lizza piece:
Taylor told his account of Allen's use of the N-word in a private email to a UVA colleague last month. The email was recently obtained by The New Republic. Taylor confirmed the authenticity of the email and reluctantly agreed to speak on the record about the incident.
Note that this is not concerning an email from George Allen to anybody; it's an email that Allen's accuser wrote, that is now being presented as "evidence" that the accuser's claims are true. This sounds a little like the "evidence" that another Allen accuser had--notes that he claimed to have started taking several months ago about his memories of Allen using the "N" word.
Get it? None of this is evidence of anything other than that this whole brouhaha has been in the works for awhile. And get the oddball story that the accuser tells:
I met him twice actaully [sic]. I did two modelling [sic] jobs with his then wife and she told me about some puppies they were trying to give away. I told her I'd like to take one. So one evening I went out to their place in the country near [Charlottesville] somewhere. There was a pond quite close by. I asked if they had any waterfowl landing there. George told me about the ducks and geese that sometimes landed there and about the ducks who tried to raise their young but who would have them all devoured by the big turtles in the pond. Well, why doesn't someone kill the turtles and eat them? I asked. George said 'only the niggers around here eat em.'
That is a very curious conversation, and its curiouser still that this guy would remember it some 25 years later. Not surprisingly, the guy's a Democrat:
Asked recently about his political leanings, Taylor, who initially requested that his story about Allen not be publicized because he feared legal action from the senator, responded, "I'm a Democrat. And I certainly want to see his [Allen's] opponent elected." Asked if he intended his email to become public, Taylor laughed. "No, it was Fred Damon who decided to tell all these other people."
This story seems to have really caught on; Drudge highlighted it yesterday. Now Len Munsil, Republican candidate for Arizona governor has made it an issue in his race against incumbent Democrat Janet Napolitano.
Munsil said that taken as a whole, the messages indict the U.S. government and mock the Bush administration.
Other critics of the sculpture have objected to specific messages, including one that says, "You don't win battles of terrorism with more battles."
"It's an anti-war mentality and an anti-American mentality," said Munsil, who won the Republican bid one day after the memorial was dedicated on Sept. 11. "The people of Arizona need to know that this is what's on state property."
Amazingly, Napolitano continues to support the project:
During last week's dedication ceremony, Napolitano said the memorial was built to preserve the meaning of Sept. 11 for future generations. While flying to Prescott on Monday, Napolitano called the memorial "impressive and meaningful" and continued to support it.
"It's a respectful memorial to the tragedy of 9/11," she said. "For him to politicize the 9/11 memorial like that is just shameful. I just think it's very sad."
That's just not going to cut it. I have long assumed that Napolitano would win this election going away, but here's a real issue that Munsil may be able to turn to his advantage.
Ben Stein notes the disturbing tactics being used against George Allen and Michael Steele:
In the past two weeks, the DNC and Democrat Party have been embarrassed by racist and anti-Semitic attacks against Republican Senate candidates Michael Steele and Sen. George Allen. In the case of Steele, it was racist blogging posts. In Allen's it was planted questions in the media about his Jewish heritage. Within minutes of Allen's addressing the issue of his family's Jewish roots, popular Democrat Party sites, such as the Daily Kos, Daily DD, and MoveOn.org, were inundated with such posts as:
"George Allen's New Jew Revue"
"They seriously want us to believe that Allen never knew why his grandfather was thrown in a concentration camp?"
Meanwhile, Allen is reported to have used the "N" word during his college days.
"Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where 'blacks knew their place,'" said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. "He used the N-word on a regular basis back then."
A second white teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign, separately claimed that Allen used the word "nigger" to describe blacks. "It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used," the teammate said.
It's of course possible that Allen did indeed use the word frequently, but it certainly seems a bit odd. Remember that because of his father's profession (football coach), Allen was probably more accustomed to being around high-achieving young black men than your average white Southerner of the times.
And Ken Shelton has ties to the Democrats. I looked up Ken Shelton in Open Secrets. He donated money in 2000 to Sam Neill (not the actor), a Democrat running for election in North Carolina's 11th Congressional District against the incumbent, Republican Charles H. Taylor. Given that Shelton's profession is described as radiologist in the Salon article, and the donor Ken Shelton's employer is given as Hendersonville Radiology, I think we've got the right man.
You know what this is all about, right? It's not about this election for Virginia Senator, it's about the 2008 Presidential Election. Proof is even in the Salon article:
The radiologist said he decided earlier this year that he would go public with his concerns about Allen if a reporter ever called. About four months ago, when he heard that Allen was a possible candidate for president in 2008, Shelton began to write down some of the negative memories of his former teammate. He provided Salon excerpts of those notes last week.
Uh-huh. "If a reporter ever called." Yeah, I can see that. He just started to write down memories of George Allen, just in case the reporters called.
Sorry, had relatives in town and forgot to set the VCR. I did catch the end of the show where everybody had to do the shoot the flaming arrow into the brazier bit. Sorry to see the cheerleaders bite the dust. Team Triathlon comes through with a big win.
One of the concerns I have for this election season is that if, as is once again looking likely, the Democrats fail to retake the House and the Senate, is that they will begin to embrace 9-11 Denial (called 9-11 Truth by members of the cult). The appeal of 9-11 Denial to the Left is that it offers the hope that they can get rid of the Bush Administration without actually winning an election.
I have been tracking this since the beginning of the summer. Very few major lefty blogs have been willing to touch "Loose Change" or 9-11 Denial. But that seems to be changing. As I blogged about at Screw Loose Change a week or so ago, the Democratic Party of Palm Beach County actually planned a screening of LC as a fundraiser before the outrage forced them to back down.
Now some of the bloggers are starting to nibble at the apple. Suburban Guerilla, which won a 2004 Koufax Award as Most Deserving of Wider Recognition, links (albeit timidly) to 9-11 Mysteries, a new 9-11 Denial film (with possibly the most annoying voiceover in the entire genre).
The Firedoglackeys have linked to 9-11 Press for Truth, a softcore version of Loose Change that's filled with lies and innuendo.
