A drug-abusing minor celebrity has offered 17-year-old Bristol Palin a $25,000 bounty to abort her child.

Hackers have broken into Palin family email accounts, and posted some of the contents, including family photos, online.

Another site claimed to have a Palin family phone number and left a message asking for nude pictures of 17-year-old Bristol.

For once, I'm at a loss for words.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:21 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 69 words, total size 1 kb.

It is now becoming abundantly clear that Barack Obama, in a meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, tried to undermine his own country's negotiations with Iraq during his July visit to Baghdad. Even the Obama campaign can't deny it because there were multiple witnesses to the exchange.

So once again, conservatives begin raising the question: Why is the mainstream media ignoring this story? They're treating it like they treated the John Edwards affair story, which they ignored until they no longer could. But this is much more serious. The Democratic nominee for president of the United States attempted to scuttle a crucial status-of-forces agreement between the U.S. and the government of Iraq. He blatantly urged the Iraqis to stop negotiating with the Bush Administration and wait until the next president – presumably him, at least as far as he's concerned – takes office.

[snip]

Why is the mainstream media ignoring the story? Well, first and foremost, because they want Obama to win the election. But it goes deeper than that. They're ignoring the story because they don't see anything wrong with what Obama did.

I'd love to give you more but that would violate fair use guidelines, so go here to read the rest.

Barack Obama illegally interjected himself into U.S. foreign policy and blatantly attempted to undermine a sitting President, secure in the knowledge that the Justice Department will not charge him with a law that hasn't been enforced in over 200 years, and knowing that the media doesn't care.

Want media attention?

Have some half-wit bail bondsman, head-wound patient, or strung-out meth junkies thrown in jail for threatening to kill Obama, even though not a single one of them could be considered a serious threat.

You'll get coverage in every major national and international news outlet for days as they fall all over each other to report that these isolated incidents are an example of how average, inbred racist rubes (Americans) cannot stand the thought of a Halfrican-American President.

But when Obama meddles in affairs that touches the lives of 140,000 soldiers—white, black, brown, yellow, and red—in a combat zone, purely for his personal political advantage?

Dead silence.

Not. A. Word.

It's a matter of priorities, folks. They want to protect Barack Obama, no matter how many Americans he endangers.

But who is going to protect us from him?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:40 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 419 words, total size 3 kb.

New York Post columnist Amir Taheri continues to hammer Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama today for secretly meddling in U.S. foreign policy in Iraq for his own naked political gain. Taheri first made these allegations on Monday, quoting Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari on the record as saying that when Obama visited Iraq in July, he tried to convince Iraqi government officials to not work with President Bush's Administration.

Obama told the Iraqis that President Bush's administration was in a "state of weakness and political confusion," and tried to convince the Iraqis to wait to negotiate on troop-level agreements until the next administration took office in 2009. At the time of his trip in July, Obama had a comfortable lead in the polls over John McCain and was assuming he would likely be President.

The American Spectator reports from sources inside the campaign that Obama's advisers were stumped for more than five hours trying to figure out a response to Taheri's article, because:

• the account was true
• there were at least three other witnesses to the conversation between Obama and Zebari
• the campaign felt there were enough reporters in Iraq that "were aggressive enough" to debunk a denial, causing the campaign even more embarrassment.

Instead, Obama's campaign attempted to rebut Taheri's article with a snide accusation that Taheri was confusing the Status of Forces agreement with a Strategic Framework Agreement, with a statement that read:

"This article bears as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial. Barack Obama has consistently called for any Strategic Framework Agreement to be submitted to the U.S. Congress so that the American people have the same opportunity for review as the Iraqi Parliament," said Obama spokeswoman Wendy Morigi. "Unlike John McCain, he supports a clear timetable to redeploy our troops that has the support of the Iraqi government. Barack Obama has never urged a delay in negotiations, nor has he urged a delay in immediately beginning a responsible drawdown of our combat brigades."

Tellingly, the Obama campaign never attempted to push the Post for a correction or retraction of Taheri's charges, and observers quickly noted the campaign's response seemed to confirm the story.

Taheri's response in today's New York Post gives the Obama campaign both barrels, first stating that if there was any confusion about the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA), the confusion came on the part of the Obama campaign, as the documents are closely intertwined. Tom Maguire notes the campaign's apparent confusion in Barack Versus Barack On Iraq, which shows Obama's own web site is consistent with Taheri's claims.

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air excoriates Obama for his "me first, country second" arrogance.

First, Senator Obama has no authority to negotiate on behalf of the executive branch, which has sole authority to conduct foreign policy. Second and most important, Obama attempted to interfere against the interests of the United States. He can ask all the questions he wants, but when Obama started pressing Iraqi officials to stop negotiations with the executive branch — in other words, break one level of diplomatic contact and freeze a military alliance in time of war — that crossed a line and clearly violated the Logan Act. It also makes clear that Obama would do anything to get elected, even harm diplomatic relations between the US and an ally.

And while many are focusing on Obama's interference in foreign policy, Taheri also noted in his Monday article that Obama tried to use his trip to pressure the military to support his political goals.

As he has made clear on numerous occasions, the first-term Senator has consistently pledged a date-based withdrawal built according to his own timetable, not a conditions-based withdrawal determined by upon security and political considerations and competencies on the ground.

Obama pressured U.S. commanders for a "realistic withdrawal date," a date that would have been used as a transparent sop to his radical left-wing political base, and an attempt to unethically put those U.S. military commanders in a position of potentially influencing the course of the 2008 U.S. presidential elections. Commanders declined to be baited.

Barack Obama attempted to compromise the pledge of military commanders to remain apolitical, while actively undermining the foreign policy of the current administration while our soldiers are still deployed.

Barack Obama clearly values what is best for Barack Obama, but does he value anything else?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:58 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 735 words, total size 6 kb.

Word coming in right now claims that at least one primary blast thought to be a car bomb and numerous smaller blasts thought to be RPGs were detonated near the front gate of the U.S. Embassy compound in San'a, Yemen, and the blasts were followed by gunfire.

Sky News is saying the attackers were dressed as soldiers, and notes that the Yemeni branch of the Islamic Jihad had made threats just three days ago.

Reuters notes that the U.S. Embassy says no Americans were among the wounded.

According to CNN, ten police and civilians were killed, as were six attackers.

Developing...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:19 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 119 words, total size 1 kb.

Barack Obama is presently droning on about the economy with the kind of rhetoric you would expect from a liberal of the bigger-the-government-the-better-the-government stripe, but what I thought was hilarious was his attack against John McCain for suggesting we need a 9/11 type commission to study what has gone wrong recently, only to turn around several minutes later and insist that we need a regulator's committee.

So we need a committee, not a commission.

Is that what Obama means by "change?"

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:45 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 99 words, total size 1 kb.

Amir Taheri raised the issue in yesterday's NY Post. I try to help provide some answers in my latest post at Pajamas Media.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:16 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 41 words, total size 1 kb.

As I write this I'm IM-ing Michael Yon on the far side of the world, and the Iraq War's most experienced embedded combat journalist is frustrated with the lack of interest in the Afghanistan-Pakistan War. Yon's Death in the Corn, Part 1 is a riveting story in a war the mainstream media has largely abandoned in order to cover far more pressing issues, such as developing new smears to float against Sarah Palin in a desperate attempt to extend the expiration date of Tina Fey's career on Saturday Night Live.

Yon's current series of combat dispatches from inside C- Company 2 Para of the British Army in Afghanistan's Helmand Province alludes to near constant war with the Taliban, but the reader interest simply doesn't seem to be there.

Ironically, the same media that tried to subvert the war in Iraq with a flood of biased reporting is far more effectively neutering support for the campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan through negligence and indifference.

Americans will support our soldiers when they can see what they are fighting for. Americans must be able to empathize with our soldiers, and those they would set free. That is the reason Yon's iconic photograph of the Iraq war, of Major Mark Bieger cradling an Iraqi girl named Farah as he rushed to get her aid when she was mortally wounded by an car bomb, mattered so much. It proved that humanizing element. But even as powerful as his photos are, and as compelling as his writing is, Yon cannot carry the coverage of the Af-Pak War on alone.

And the Af-Pak War promises to get far worse before it gets better.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been using the tribal regions of Pakistan along the Afghan border as a sanctuary with the blessing and support of the ISI, Pakistan's most powerful intelligence service. President Bush, frustrated by the refusal of the Pakistani government to more actively act as an ally against al Qaeda and the Taliban, secretly authorized cross-border special forces raids, the authorization of which was of course loudly trumpeted in pages of the New York Times.

As a result, an embarrassed Pakistani military was compelled to announce they would fire on U.S. forces if they crossed the border. Allies? Perhaps we never really were, though we certainly liked to pretend that it were so. That illusion now seems to be falling away.

Interestingly, Pakistan's involvement, and the need to take the fight into the tribal regions, may have been one of the things that Barack Obama's army of 300 policy advisers got right, and as Chrstopher Hitchen's notes, may lead a much more involved and bloody war.

Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

Two-important questions are raised by Hitchens' article.

• Will Republican Presidential candidate John McCain adopt Obama's more muscular approach in dealing with Pakistan's support of the Taliban if elected?
• Will Barack Obama have the mettle for a rare and prolonged break with his base and the Democratic Party he has voted with 96-percent of the time if elected, to fight the war he argues must be fought?

If McCain adopts a more muscular support, his track records suggests that he is willing to shoulder the burden of being unpopular, if it means seeing the war through to victory.

Barack Obama? He's never had to stand on his own before, and I'm not sure he's even tried.

If he is elected, and rises to the challenge of his rhetoric, I suspect he'll be as surprised as the rest of us.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:11 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 752 words, total size 5 kb.

Hope is the reason Gianna Jesson won't be voting for Barack Obama.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:13 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

Kathy N, a reader from Barack Obama's home state of Hawaii, wrote this morning to say that in late August she came to the conclusion that Barack Obama has a lot in common with Milli Vanilla, and that she was rather impressed that I'd come to the same conclusion six months earlier.

Does the comparison still hold up?

As more comes out seeming to indicate that Barack Obama was nothing more than a lip-synching puppet for Bill Ayers funneling tens of millions of dollars in grant money to Ayers, Mike Klonsky, and other former radicals it seems only one conclusion is possible.

Girl you know it's true.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:07 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 113 words, total size 1 kb.

Michael Yon, currently embedded with British Paras in a combat outpost in Afghanistan, will be a guest Sunday Sept 14 at 11:00 PM on The JihadiKiller Hour on BlogTalk Radio. Listen if you can.

Yon's next dispatch "Death In the Corn" will be posted at http://www.michaelyon-online.com/ tomorrow.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:00 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 63 words, total size 1 kb.

Some panicky progressives keep claiming (erroneously) that while as Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin banned book in the public library, or tried to ban books, and some of the rumors being passed around even attempt to named books that the rumor creators said were banned.

Want a full, official list of every book ever banned in Wasilla, AK?

Here you go, taken from the official source (PDF).

No books have ever been banned in Wasilla at the request of Sarah Palin, or anyone else. Further, only one of the five books challenged even occurred during her terms in office.

Reality, folks.

Try it sometime.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:45 AM | Comments (61) | Add Comment
Post contains 117 words, total size 1 kb.

After reading the NY Times rail against Sarah Palin's style of governance, making it very clear that they find it reprehensible when political appointees are replaced by incoming elected officials, I can only assume that they will protest loudly if the next President does not keep President Bush's appointees once he takes office.

It's good to know they support such a continuity in government, doesn't it?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:50 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 78 words, total size 1 kb.

Air America talk radio host Randi Rhodes, last seen here almost a year ago when she claimed she was assaulted, before it was exposed that the culprit who knocked out her teeth was her own liver acting in self defense, is back in the news again.

Rhodes asserted Sarah Palin was a potential child molester, and sadly, no, I'm not kidding.

Rhodes is the same Air America host that recently claimed John McCain was treated well by the North Vietnamese that tortured him, and he has a lengthy history of other embarrassing rants that make liberals look like mean-spirited, ignorant fools... kinda like Obama's latest ad against McCain over email.

I'm not surprised at all that Rhodes would chose to stay in the gutter as that is very much her shtick. But is she really the among the best liberal talk radio has to offer?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:20 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
Post contains 155 words, total size 1 kb.

If you can warp time to imagine Richard Nixon consorting with Eric Robert Rudolph for more than 20 years on public policy issues, then you can begin to understand the relationship between Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and one of the men who made him in Chicago machine politics, Bill Ayers. What you may not be able to understand is why Obama's campaign is apparently working with Ayers to suppress the extent of their relationship.

Who was Bill Ayers?

Ayers was a founder and leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group that declared war upon the United States, bombed government buildings, murdered law enforcement officers during armed robberies, fire-bombed a judge's home, and had planned what could have been the largest terrorist mass murder in America prior to 9/11. That attack was only thwarted by the premature detonation of massive roofing nail-studded pipe bombs by Ayer's girlfriend and fellow terrorist, Diana Oughton, bombs destined for a non-commissioned officers dance at Fort Dix. The blast of just some of the pipe bombs leveled a four-story Greenwich Village townhouse; four more nail-studded bombs were recovered in the rubble, along with 57 sticks of dynamite. The anti-personnel bombs created by the Weathermen were designed to kill hundreds.

That Obama and Ayers have long had a relationship has never been in doubt, but until recently, Obama attempted to minimize that relationship, describing Ayers as little more than an college professor, someone who lived in his neighborhood, with whom he'd had minimal contact. A compliant media has even tried to claim the Weathermen never killed anyone other than their own members, a transparent falsehood.

But the facade of a distant relationship the Obama campaign has constructed between the candidate and the aging terrorist is slipping. In a recent interview with Bill O'Reilly, Obama admitted a bit more about the extent of his relationship with Ayers.

Ayers and Obama had partnered together at the Woods Funds on various projects as members of the board of directors, in the legislature on striking down a crime bill that would have sentenced youth offends to an adult prison for a second violent crime, and most interestingly, on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), a school reform project written by Ayers that collected $49 million from the Annenberg Foundation and was tasked with raising and distributing $98 million more.

According to the NY Times, Obama was nominated to the CAC board in 1995 and was elected chairman, despite having a paltry resume in regards to education experience, and in spite of the fact that the board had far more qualified education experts on the board for consideration, including two college presidents.

The same article notes that Bill Ayer's helped write the CAC proposal and that as soon as Obama was seated, the board was pushed to start approving enrichment program grant proposals "quickly," with little apparent regard for the quality of the proposals. A board member stated in 1998 that "the project proposals by and large were awful," and ran counter to the goals and educational strategy of the Chicago Public Schools.

As Patterico notes, the enrichment programs that the CAC doled out money to under Obama's watch seemed geared more towards indoctrination than education, as at least some of the money Ayer's helped secure was funneled to Ayer's peers, including fellow 1960s radical Mike Klonsky, who received one of the first CAC grants of $175,000 for his Small Schools Workshop (Klonsky's blog was recently removed form the Obama campaign web site when Klonsky's radical past was exposed).

What do we know about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge other than it was deemed a disastrously-run failure, and just how close were Ayers and Obama working together?

That is a question that Professor Steve Diamond of Santa Clara University Law School would like answered, but instead of getting answers, he's run into a wall of Obama supporters that he claims is a part of a secret unit of the Obama-Biden campaign similar to Richard Nixon's =""Plumbers," a group designed to prevent leaks of information that could be damaging to the campaign.

Obama's Plumblers are tasked with limiting access to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents housed at the University of Illinois Library in Chicago, and according to Diamond, were behind attempts to blunt the efforts of Stanley Kurtz of the National Review to obtain the documents, some of which may have been removed before Kurtz was afforded access.

Who are Obama's Plumbers?

If a Democratic source of Diamond's is correct, the suppression effort is being led by none other than Bill Ayers himself, and includes other members of "Progressives for Obama" that have direct access to David Axelrod, Obama's campaign manager.

Another named member is former CAC executive director Ken Rolling. Rolling, as it turns out, was responsible for awarding the grant that brought Barack Obama to Chicago in his first job as a community organizer. Ayers later helped place Rolling as the CAC executive director.

It appears there is a distinct possibility that Barack Obama was brought onto the board the CAC by Bill Ayers and pushed into the chairmanship despite not being nearly as qualified as others of the board for one simple, central purpose; to help launder (for lack of a better word) grant money into the hands of Ayer's contemporaries in the far left extreme of Chicago's Marxist/Communist education community, such as the $175,000 funneled to Klonsky.

Ayers, Klonsky, and other radicals decided long ago that they cannot win with pipe bombs, and decided to continue their war against America by indoctrinating children via the application of Marxist educational theory. Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Mike Klonsky, and other radicals of the 1960s never gave up their attempts to undermine America.

They just went underground, until they had a suitably pliable champion to be their figurehead, and that champion, Barack Obama, would rather that relationship remain hidden.

Update: I contacted Professor Diamond via email to follow-up, and he is disputing substantial parts of what Batchelor attributes to him in the Human Events article, and I confused something Batchelor claimed and misreported it as Diamond's statement.

First, the mis-attribution I made.

Professor Diamond states that the does not have contacts in the Democratic Party, and he's right; it was Batchelor that claimed he had party sources. Diamond emphasises that based upon what he knows, there is "no basis to conclude... that Axelrod or anyone else from the campaign is involved" if such an effort is underway, and he did not hit any sort of a wall of Obama supporters, which was my attempt to describe the role of poltical plumbers as a barrier.

He further wants to clarify that he doesn't think anyone associated with Joe Biden would have anything to do with any CAC coverup attempt that may be underway, and he does not know if Obama's plumbers exist in fact. If they do, it doesn't seem they &qout;are committed to breaking the law" if necessary, as Nixon's were.

Everything else related to the Human Events article must stand or fall based upon John Batchelor's sources and claims.

And Barack Obama and Bill Ayers have a $150 million failure to explain.

Update: A closely related story of Obama using the Woods Fund to advance his career at Pajamas Media.

Oh, what a tangled web...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:41 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 1224 words, total size 8 kb.

On Fox News Live Desk discussing Sarah Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson, Wolf claimed that Palin "falsely linked al Qaeda to 9/11."

Uh-huh.

Drugs are bad, kids.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:43 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 41 words, total size 1 kb.

The willingness of the press to lie to undercut Sarah Palin is really getting obscene:

Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

Anne E. Kornblut, just stop.

Unless Kornblut buried the lede, Palin said precisely nothing about Saddam Hussein or his government at all or any roll they may have had in 9/11. Kornblut simply made that up, because she wanted Palin to say that.

When Palin referenced "...the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans," is was an obvious reference to al Qaeda in Iraq, an offshoot of the parent al Qaeda organization that plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks, and while still funds and loosely controls the failing Iraqi branch.

And the parent organization is not happy with the branch office:

Al Qaeda's senior leadership has lost confidence in its commander in Iraq and views the situation in the country as dire, according to a series of letters intercepted by Multinational Forces Iraq earlier this year.

The letters, which have been sent exclusively to The Long War Journal by Multinational Forces Iraq, are a series of communications between Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second in command, Abu Ayyub al Masri, al Qaeda in Iraq's leader, and Abu Omar al Baghdadi, the leader of al Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq. These letters were intercepted by Coalition forces in Baghdad on April 24, 2008. One of the letters written by Zawahiri is dated March 6, 2008.

[snip]

"The letters confirmed our assessment that Al Qaeda has suffered significant damage and serious reverses in Iraq, including widespread rejection of [al Qaeda in Iraq's] indiscriminate violence, extremist ideology, and oppressive practices," General David Petraeus, the Commander of Multinational Forces Iraq told The Long War Journal. "Even Zawahiri recognized that [al Qaeda in Iraq] has lost credibility in Iraq."

Sarah Palin was obviously addressing the living al Qaeda terrorists that soldiers would face in Iraq, no the ghosts of a regime long dead. How biased or simply dishonest does a reporter have to be to twist that?

Here's a novel concept: why don't reporters limit themselves to reporting facts.

Or is that simply too much to ask for a media more interested in selecting a President than electing one?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:15 AM | Comments (21) | Add Comment
Post contains 475 words, total size 3 kb.

You would think that a nationally-recognized news anchor who landed the most coveted interview of the 2008 elections would have done his research to be fully prepared, so that when the interview aired, he wouldn't look like a fumbling, pretentious ass.

And then there's Charlie Gibson of ABC News, a journalist I respected until just hours ago.

Given the opportunity to interview Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin—and some would argue, given the responsibility to be both thorough and fair—Gibson attempted to trap Palin with a question designed to portray her as a religious fundementalist:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God." Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don't know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words when he said -- first, he suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words.

But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God's side.

That's what that comment was all about, Charlie.

But Gibson's "quote" of Palin's "exact words" was anything but an exact quote; the statement Gibson attributed to Palin was for all intents and purposes fiction, real sentences ripped apart and rearranged to mean exactly what journalists wanted them to mean.

Here is what Palin really said:

"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she exhorted the congregants. "ThatÂ’s what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

The words in bold are those journalists simply removed from their report, in order to try to cast Palin as a religious extremist.

They tried turning a servant's simple prayer asking God for guidance, into the raving of a false prophet telling the congregation that she knows the mind of God.

Journalists doctored the quote so that this manufactured Palin would scare American voters.

Nice work trying to set a trap, Charlie.

And great work doctoring the original quote, Gene Johnson of the Associated Press.

I'm sure you've both made your bosses proud.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:25 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 441 words, total size 3 kb.

So right, so wrong, and yet so perfect on many levels.

Spot the celebrity, kids.

Do you get the feeling Boy George and Sully want to make Barack Obama the meat filling in a manwich?

h/t Ace, who is getting my cleaning bill... KRYMB!

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:39 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 60 words, total size 1 kb.

If it wasn't for you, I would not have realized that the easily-fooled, knuckle-dragging rubes that I call my neighbors are delusional morons, that the small towns I've lived in and around for most of my life are nothing more than bland and unimportant suburbs, and that the farmers I know are just corporate shills. Further, I would not know that all of us are part of a mythical America that is subservient and somewhat less important that the magnificence of that metropolis you call home, and of far less importance than the power and majesty of The One.

Amen.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:37 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
Post contains 108 words, total size 1 kb.

Many of my fellow bloggers are posting tributes to those who fell on 9/11, or recollections of a sort — mine is closest to Ace's, if you care — but I can't form anything of which I'm proud.

I hate to say it, but can't be sure I clearly recall 9/11 anymore, and in fact, I'm pretty sure I don't.

I remember flashes of details, but what I archived of that September morning were little more than a swirl of naked unformed emotions I've never been able to articulate and I know I never will, and I know the memories of that day were rewritten and rewritten again in my mind in the days that followed.

One thing I recall with perfect certainty, without reservation. How unbelievably, beautifully crisp and blue the sky was that morning in the Hudson Valley after it all happened.

I lived in a little town on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River at the time called New Windsor.

In the days and weeks that followed, as the rest of the country was coming to grips with the magnitude of the total loss, we were watching funerals of our neighbors in the surrounding small towns, and hearing the survival stories of others. Again, I don't trust the memories and can't channel the emotions, and I won't cheapen the memories of those lost with what I do recall with forced sentimentality.

Those of you who lost someone that day or part of yourself, you have my sincere condolences. For my neighbor across the street, the NYPD cop that aged years in the months that followed, I'm sorry I could not take on part of your burden.

For the rest, I simply have nothing worth saying.

Sorry.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:36 AM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
Post contains 293 words, total size 2 kb.