Election2008 Predicted by Little Kids

From the mouthes of babes, yada yada yad….

Just days before Americans choose our next president, voting has concluded in the Weekly Reader Student Presidential Election Poll. And the nation’s students resoundingly say that Barack Obama will be the country’s next leader. In the 14th Weekly Reader election survey, with more than 125,000 votes cast from kindergarten through 12th grade, the result was Obama 54.7% and John McCain 42.9% (with “other” candidates receiving 2.5% of the student vote). The Obama victory in the classroom electoral vote was even more resounding: The Democrat won 33 states and the District of Columbia, garnering 420 electoral votes, while McCain took 17 states and 118 electoral votes.

For the past 52 years, the results of the Weekly Reader poll have been consistently on target, with the student vote correctly predicting the next president in 12 out of 13 elections. (The only time the kids were wrong was 1992, when they chose George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton.) This year, as in 2000 and 2004, the student election was conducted in conjunction with noted polling organization Zogby International. [more]

Our Leaders Learn One from “Inexperienced” Obama: Maybe Negotiation Can Succeed Where Empty Bluster Doesn’t

Fox Bidness Journal:

The U.S. is actively considering talks with elements of the Taliban, the armed Islamist group that once ruled Afghanistan and sheltered al Qaeda, in a major policy shift that would have been unthinkable a few months ago.

U.S. Marine Staff Sgt. Joseph Debose, 26, stands among village elders as Afghan and American forces search for weapons Oct. 25 in the Korengal Valley of Kunar Province in eastern Afghanistan.

Senior White House and military officials believe that engaging some levels of the Taliban — while excluding top leaders — could help reverse a pronounced downward spiral in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. Both countries have been destabilized by a recent wave of violence.

People of Principle

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being “dangerously weak on crime,” “coddling criminals,” and for voting against “protecting children from danger.” [more]

Why is This Woman Smiling?

Yes, I intend to live to regret this. I mean, I really hope to live to 5 November 2008 so if, you know, McAlin actually wins, yes, I will regret the hubris….

Why Al-Qaida Has Endorsed John Sidney McCain III

Global policing and engagement will defeat the Islamofascist terrorists.

Blustering and demonization and egging on Israel to beat up on Palestinians less for their security and more to suck up to the American administration fills their ranks and strengthens them.

John Sidney McCain III cannot make you secure.

He can make the terrorist secure.

You can vote for America or you can vote to enable terrorism.

That’s the reall terrorism, not Sarah Palin’s dishonest spew.

More about this lonely endorsement here.

Steal Back Your Vote! Make Sure it Counts — and is Counted

Here’s what to do.

We used to have free elections in this country….

The Other John Sidney McCains Maybe were No Better….

Read about the others here — cocksuckers all.

If John Sidney McCain III Loses, Maybe this will be Why and How

Me, I generally agree there was a major personality or temperment issue — he just couldn’t help it.

Assuming the 2000 model was the “real” McCain, once he got the nomination, he was the head of a legion of goose-steppeers that would rally around their nominee. And if he needed a psycho to excite the base, that’s why God invented vice presidential candidates.

So what did he do? Ran on absolute, pure crap.

But I don’t think he could help it. Not to be too blunt about it, JSMcC3 was an arrogant, stupid son of a bitch and, I’m sorry to say this, as a result of his imprisonment, became a cocksucker. (Listen: One does what one has to do to survive. But to carry on with prison behavior thirty years after release…. (Of course, the Forestal disaster was before the extended stay in Hanoi.))

What an awful combination.

War Room and one version of why he lost if he loses:

With a week to go before the presidential election, conservatives are starting to abandon ship. Some are just acting out, but Rich Lowry has a thoughtful column in which he articulates what he calls the fundamental “paradox” of John McCain’s presidential bid — namely, that his biography made him ideally suited to be the nominee in an inarguably tough cycle for Republicans, but his gadfly approach to electoral politics was ill-suited for managing a maverick-themed campaign bid. Lowry:

This is the McCain paradox: No other Republican candidate had a character and background — as a courageously independent spirit — better suited to making the presidential campaign competitive this year. But perhaps no Republican candidate was so poorly suited to the task of running a presidential race.

McCain earned his chops as the media’s favorite Republican senator by being a maverick, or in a less exalted formulation, a gadfly. He pursued pet causes inimical to his party, such as campaign-finance reform, and made it his role to tell fellow Republicans what he considered hard truths.

None of this endeared him to Republican primary voters. He won the nomination anyway on the basis of his admirable support for the surge (adopted when he was in typical gadfly mode) and a few stock lines. He became the Republican nominee by default, without an organization or fundraising operation to speak of, and soon enough lost the press, too.

McCain’s rapport with the media depended on snarky banter about his own party and about himself. That couldn’t continue in the general election, so McCain’s campaign cut him off. His lifeline to his former admirers denied to him, McCain became a demonstrably unhappy warrior.

As a gadfly, McCain often attacked Republican campaign tactics. He denounced the Swift Boat vets in 2004. Still thinking like a gadfly, back in April he reprimanded the North Carolina Republican Party for running an ad featuring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. In ruling Wright out of bounds, McCain had taken off the table Barack Obama’s most damaging association. McCain had gadflied himself!

McCain was, in fact, the best of a weak field of 2008 GOP hopefuls, in part because of his biography and in part because he really has voted against his party on some key issues (torture, energy, campaign finance and, for a while at least, immigration). Yet it may also be true that, given how bad the cycle was for the GOP, going negative on Obama and acting like a base conservative Republican willing to use kitchen-sink negative tactics was McCain’s only strategy for winning. I guess we’ll never know whether a high-road campaign might have saved him, his reputation and the Republicans’ chances in 2008.

Pat Buchanan Predicts Paradise

Except for his irrational rightist bogies….

War Room:

Pat Buchanan has donned a Halloween mask. And, à la Andy Warhol, it’s just a mask of his own face!

Here’s his latest syndicated column, in which Count Buchanula tries to scare the kiddies with thoughts of the frightening horrors of a possible Obama administration and a Democrat-controlled Washington:

What does the triumvirate of Obama-Pelosi-Reid offer?

Rep. Barney Frank is calling for new tax hikes on the most successful and a 25 percent across-the-board slash in national defense. Sen. John Kerry is talking up new and massive federal spending, a la FDR’s New Deal. Specifically, we can almost surely expect:

– Swift amnesty for 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and a drive to make them citizens and register them, as in the Bill Clinton years. This will mean that Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona will soon move out of reach for GOP presidential candidates, as has California.

– Border security will go on the backburner, and America will have a virtual open border with a Mexico of 110 million.

– Taxes will be raised on the top 5 percent of wage-earners, who now carry 60 percent of the U.S. income tax burden, and tens of millions of checks will be sent out to the 40 percent of wage-earners who pay no federal income tax. Like the man said, redistribute the wealth, spread it around.

– Social Security taxes will be raised on the most successful among us, and capital gains taxes will be raised from 15 percent to 20 percent. The Bush tax cuts will be repealed, and death taxes reimposed.

– Two or three more liberal activists of the Ruth Bader Ginsberg-John Paul Stevens stripe will be named to the Supreme Court. U.S. district and appellate courts will be stacked with “progressives.”

– Special protections for homosexuals will be written into all civil rights laws, and gays and lesbians in the military will be invited to come out of the closet. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will be dead.

– The homosexual marriages that state judges have forced California, Massachusetts and Connecticut to recognize, an Obama Congress or Obama court will require all 50 states to recognize.

– A “Freedom of Choice Act” nullifying all state restrictions on abortions will be enacted. America will become the most pro-abortion nation on earth.

– Affirmative action — hiring and promotions based on race, sex and sexual orientation until specified quotas are reached — will be rigorously enforced throughout the U.S. government and private sector.

– Universal health insurance will be enacted, covering legal and illegal immigrants, providing another powerful magnet for the world to come to America, if necessary by breaching her borders.

– A federal bailout of states and municipalities to keep state and local governments spending up could come in December or early next year.

– The first trillion-dollar deficit will be run in the first year of an Obama presidency. It will be the first of many.

Welcome to Obamaland!

Bwaaaaahaaaaa. Boo!

Teach ‘Em Young: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. And Adults Really are a Bunch of Assholes

A 15-year-old high school student in New York State has been charged with three felonies after he allegedly accessed personnel records on his school’s poorly configured computer network and then notified his principal of the security weakness.