“...we control the narrative. Do not attempt to adjust your thinking except in ways we desire.”
Knowing that the Republicans are attempting to distract voters away from the big issues of the day, “are we in the media going to aid and abet the McCain campaign’s obvious ploy?” asks the WP’s Eugene Robinson. Even if reporters point out that that the allegations McCain’s campaign makes are false, “writing about them at all gives them wider circulation.” Journalists “have a duty to avoid being turned into instruments of mass distraction” and must press for answers about the issues that really matter. “The McCain campaign has made clear that it wants to change the subject,” writes Robinson. “We can, and should, change it back.”
Is it really 1992 all over again? Back then, when George H.W. Bush was fighting for re-election against the media-endorsed Clinton-Gore ticket, a major media denizen was quoted as insisting that his industry would not allow the Republicans to win.
The comment was picked up on by conservative opinion media at the time, but the media still got away with it and their preferred candidate was elected.
Is 2008 really all that different from 1992? Can a nation be hoodwinked twice in living memory by an actively biased media doing the exact same thing it did before? Only the American people can decide that—but, “Fool me once, shame on you...” would seem to apply.
California is continuing to jockey for a multibillion-dollar emergency federal loan despite Friday’s congressional approval of a rescue plan for the nation’s troubled credit market.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said.
The governor had sent a letter Thursday to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson warning that the state may be forced to turn to the federal treasury for help if it cannot quickly secure a short-term loan for up to $7 billion.
The American taxpayer shouldn’t have to keep bailing out the Democrat Legislature that keeps spending your state into bankruptcy—apparently about every four years.
I thought the 2004 bailout was okay, but the idea was that you only get one visit to the well.
And thanks to the banking bailout, the well’s pretty much dry now anyway.
If you haven’t read the previous chapters, they’re all here. If you’ve been keeping up but think you might have missed anything in Chapter 4, it’s here.
Billy puttered up Bob’s street on the dirt bike just as Caleb and Dad were inspecting the go-cart.
Bob had talked his father into providing spare parts from his collection to build an engine, gearbox and clutch for the go-cart, and helping us find other assorted parts at a scrapyard out on Oil Patch Road where the owner owed Caleb a favor and let us have the parts for free. Once we had everything we needed, it only took us another week to finish the project, and Mom wanted Dad to look it over before I tried to drive it.
Billy’s arrival drew a stare from Dad, but after a moment he seemed to shrug it off and resumed inspecting the go-cart.
“What do you think, Frank?” asked Caleb expectantly. He was humoring Dad and Dad knew it, both well aware that Caleb knew more about engines, and was no more likely to let his son operate an unsafe machine than Dad was to let me. But we all knew Dad was only humoring Mom, so he played along.
After a moment, Dad turned to Bob. “Let’s see you take it up and down the block a couple times.”
Bob grinned and climbed into the old riding-mower seat we’d used, and I went around back to start the motor. Though we were using a motorcycle engine, the kick starter wasn’t practical on a go-cart so we’d adapted the pull-start.
“Clutch," I called out.
Bob pushed down on the clutch pedal and said, “Clutch.”
“Brake."
We went through the whole checklist like this for the grown-ups’ benefit, until all that was left was for me to pull the cord. It fired right up, and Bob only had to adjust the choke a little to make the motor rumble like a real Harley-Davidson chopper.
Caleb, Bob and I were all grinning with pride, and Billy sat on the dirt bike next to Dad’s car, looking on with a grin of his own. Dad’s eyes went wide, though, at the serious sound of the motor, and he gave Caleb a doubtful look. “How fast will this thing go?” he asked over the noise.
It would be impossible to refrain entirely from blogging through the month of October in a presidential election year, but the activity here is almost certainly going to be light between now and Halloween.
Besides, I have fiction to write. Y’all take up the slack for me on that blogging stuff, okay?
Even the big-government Democrats knew it was going to be an albatross.
“All we needed was enough to potentially get us over the finish line, but we wanted the Republicans to be the ones to do it. This was not going to be a Democrat-passed bill if the Speaker had anything to say about it.”
They could have passed it without a single Republican vote, but averting the end of the world as we knew it, took a back seat to the kind of bipartisanship these Democrats like to practice: that of shifting blame onto the other party.
Meanwhile, the sun still shines and the birds still sing. Is this crisis really as bad as the Mainstream Media have been telling us?
Even more to the point, be careful what you risk your entire institutional reserve of credibility—such as it is—for.
I probably should have been sending you this warning long ago—like, starting in 1992 maybe.
Oh wait, I was. Along with a whole lot of other people. Well, how many times do you think you’ll be able to pull your own self-pwn3d arses out of the fire after another one of your magical Democrats self-combusts all over you? (I know what Bill Clinton did all over you wasn’t literally combustion, but combustibilitywas involved...)
You have to know that once this election campaign is over, you’ll be back on the sidewalk again, trying to figure out how to withhold a little bit of money for yourself without your pimp finding out and beating you up.
Rude and distracted drivers in Coweta County—longtime readers of The McGehee Zone may already know about the tailgating and center-line crossing that goes on around here—have sent three rural mail carriers to the hospital this summer.
Betsy Tomlinson, a substitute carrier who’s driven all 15 of Sharpsburg’s routes, described the trend and the increasing “near misses” more bluntly.
“They’re rude. The drivers are just rude,” she said.
She described impatient drivers who follow too closely, and then slam on their brakes at the last minute or “sling out” into oncoming traffic to pass the carriers instead of waiting until there are safer sections to pass. While postal carriers pull off the road when they’re able, the problem with Hwys. 154 and 16 is that there aren’t a lot of places where the carriers can pull over.
“They’ll get right up on our rear end,” Tomlinson said. “I’ve had people behind me, follow me and watch me box the mail, stop after stop, and after they pass, they honk their horn at me. They get mad because I’m blocking their way, and I’m doing my job. Everybody out there is trying to do their job.”
A couple of weeks ago on our way home from dinner in my wife’s car, we were aggressively tailgated by a driver who didn’t like that Chris was obeying the speed limit. No matter what she did this lunatic didn’t back off for more than a couple of seconds—and then as we turned off the highway toward home, Rage Boy honked to make sure we knew his bad behavior was all our fault.
More recently, we were waiting to turn in at a local store, a left turn which mean we had to wait for oncoming traffic. When that traffic cleared, an idiot in a red pickup leaving the store honked at us for making our turn instead of letting him make his ahead of us.
Doesn’t it seem to you that acting rudely at a woman driver when her husband is in the car with her is kind of a dumb thing to do? That may be why none of these nutless wonders followed us to reiterate their displeasure face to face.
In my own truck, I was recently tailgated and nearly rear-ended by a woman in a pickup who was simply not paying attention to her driving. When I slowed to turn off, I watched in my rearview mirror and saw the precise moment when she realized she was about to plow into the rear end of my Bronco at 45 mph. And because my A/C is still out and I had my rear window partly rolled down for ventilation, I heard the screech of her tires as she locked up her brakes to avoid the collision.
What I don’t know is whether she was wishing, as she drove on after I made my turn, that she’d worn her brown pants. If I’d been in anything less massive myself, I probably would have been. At least she had the good grace not to honk at me for her mistake.
What will inevitably happen is that one of these rude yahoos will cross paths with another, and they’ll kill each other. Hopefully before they end up killing someone who’s merely stupid, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As co-blogger Jonathan reports below, the Obama campaign has sicced its lawyers on t.v. stations that might air a well-sourced NRA advertisement that correctly points out Obama’s longstanding anti-gun record. The proper response to such attempts to infringe on the First Amendment is to make sure that the video in question receives the widest circulation possible, to deter the Obama campaign, and other campaigns for that matter, from engaging in such tactics in the future. So here it is. Share it with a friend, with a note that Obama is threatening legal action against stations that run it, in violation of the First Amendment.
Like the one below about the mortgage bank crisis, this one also needs to be put in front of as many eyes as possible—though in this case, people who don’t imagine that guns roam the streets at night like murderous zombies, would be the preferred target. Also, those who don’t think it’s kosher for a presidential candidate to try to bully media outlets into quashing opposing views.
