Woe is us.  Almost no bright side to this.  Taxers and spenders in charge.  Believers in what got us to this economic pass now running things.  Even our heroes believe in government beyond what any sane person should.  New party coming maybe.  Remade Republicans, that is. 

We don’t have McCain to pick on any more.  He can go back to his bipartisanship.  It gave us and him a law inhibiting free speech before elections which by various twists and turns worked specifically against him this time around.  His opponent reneged, saw his opening and took it, in pragmatic fashion. 

Somewhere in this blog is me wondering if David Axelrod were out of his depth on the national scene.  I’m leaving it there for my own disedification as object lesson in not venturing beyond one’s own depth (mine).

The Age of Sarah has dawned, in any event.  First of all, she’s a campaigner of the first water.  How do you win without one?  Second, she has terrific instincts.  Repeats herself in bald, even bland terms too often, but also has zingers to burn.  Third, she’s smart.  The 2012 campaign has its first candidate.

More later, in fact more more more . . .

We may and should distinguish between vote fraud and voter-registration fraud, or mistakes.  The phone registrants may not vote.  Then again, they may, and if there are a lot of them, as in Ohio this election, we should look for vote fraud.

Here’s John Fund on the issue in the 10/30/08 WSJ.com’s Political Diary:

[Karen] Gillette [ACORN’s Project Vote head fund-raiser] certainly deserves more scrutiny [in the matter of trolling for money among maxed-out Obama donors supplied by the Obama campaign]. In 2006, she was a campaign consultant for Jennifer Brunner, the Acorn-backed Democratic candidate for Ohio secretary of state. Since her election, Ms. Brunner has outraged Republicans and left many objective observers puzzled by her judgment calls.

Some 660,000 new voter registrations have been filed in Ohio this year by groups including Acorn, and more than 200,000 failed a “match up” test in which voter information was compared with driver’s license and Social Security databases. Despite these warning signs, Ms. Brunner refused to allow county officials access to information they needed to verify the newly registered voters.

Many of the new registrants cast ballots earlier this month in Ohio’s “Golden Week,” a seven-day period when state residents can register and immediately cast an absentee ballot. At least half a dozen cases have been documented of people illegally registering and casting ballots during “Golden Week.”

Republicans seeking to force Secretary Brunner to surrender the data have been stymied in court, but their hand may be strengthened by the latest revelation that Ms. Brunner’s campaign consultant has close ties with Acorn’s Project Vote and has been accused under oath of obtaining donor lists from the Obama campaign to drum up dollars for Acorn’s voter registration effort — including its large Ohio operation.

If Ohio goes for Obama by a slim margin, the courts may be busier than polling places have been, says Fund, here paraphrased.

Go here for a rousing talk by Arnold Schwarzenegger introducing McCain.  It’s a barn-burner.

He left Europe “because socialism had killed opportunities there.”

Only in America could he have done as well, ten times better than anywhere else.

He hits the anti-secret ballot legislation that Obama supports in union elections.

He hits Obama’s wealth-spreading: In this country “democracy is not for sale.”

He asks, which do you want in your leader, eloquence or courage?

As Power Line asks, where has he been for the last month or two on the campaign trail?

Yes.  He’s terrific, even referring to his own tax-raising (arguably not a good idea) as needed to meet government costs, vs. Obama’s ideological motivation, as in the importance of spreading wealth.

Bill Ayers, Bernardin Dohrn, and their Weather Underground comrades wrote and published Prairie Fire in 1974.  It’s their manifesto, now very hard to get.  Abebooks had one copy a few hours ago, at $199!  Just now I looked, and it’s been sold.  The blogger at Zombietime got a copy and quotes from it liberally, summarizing:

Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings — their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in Ayers’ own words.

They wanted to overthrow the government violently.  He became Obama’s ally in distributing Annenberg wealth to radical causes.

In this book, Ayers and friends list their crimes proudly.  Ayers

may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers decribed himself as “guilty as hell, free as a bird.”

But Mayordaley II dismisses it all.  Obama knows better.  He has denied more than a passing acquaintance with Ayers and Dohrn, at first lying, then admitting a little — at all times given a pass by MainStream Media such as Georgie Anne Geyer, who once bearded Castro in his den, or at least once she was out of it, but seems now to have lost her curve ball.

====================

Later: Prairie Fire is available in .pdf at Little Green Footballs, but the site is unreachable at this point, 11 pm CDT Saturday.  Keep trying. 

Yesterday the Florida TV interviewer annoying Biden with tough questions and the campaign’s cancelling the wife’s interview and cutting off further appearances at this (Orlando) station.  Today more:

Obama’s Florida spokeswoman, Adrianne Marsh, also released a statement claiming the interview was “combative and woefully uninformed about simple facts.”

“There’s nothing wrong with tough questions, but reporters have the very important job of sharing the truth with the public – not misleading the American people with false information,” Marsh said.

Ah yes, and we the party will decide what’s true.  TV interviewers, butt out.

“Senator Biden handled the interview well. However, the anchor was completely unprofessional.”

Kelly McBride, a faculty member at the Poynter Institute – a resource group for journalists in Florida, which owns The Saint Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, told CNSNews.com that the interview was “a classic case of partisan journalism.”

Au contraire, it was classic hard-hitting, as I said, the way all candidates should be interviewed.

“I think it’s absolutely horrible journalism,” McBride said. “It’s an example of a loaded question where she is presuming the answer. She has no intention of exploring for the audience the positions of the candidate. It’s clearly partisan.”

Nope, and what prevented Biden from saying that, Ms. McBride?  Her Poynter Institute is a mainstream media lapdog anyhow, with a trade publication whose ambit is entirely determined by the trade’s dominant conventional wisdom, incapable of radical critique.  Do you expect The Hatter’s Journal to question hats?

The interviewer, Barbara West, had McCain at her disposal a few days later.

West’s interview with Biden on Thursday prompted McCain, who interviewed with her on Monday, to interrupt at the beginning of the segment and warn her not to be too tough on him.
 
“Now don’t say anything mean or I am going to be angry,” said McCain.
 
West opened the interview by asking McCain if he thought his running mate, Sarah Palin, was distancing herself from him because she thought their ticket would lose the election in November.
 
“Is that indicative that she believes her campaign is not going to win and she is positioning herself for the future?” asked West. 

See what I mean?  West’s clients are the public, not the candidate.