Life in all of its glory from conception to natural death:

Republican vice-presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin’s Friday speech describing her commitment to policies which assist children with special needs was praised by the president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List as an offer of “compassion and concrete help” to those in need.

Palin’s remarks came in her first policy speech on the issue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She advocated school choice opportunities for special needs children, fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and lowering taxes on special needs trusts which families establish to fund long-term care for their children.

“Very rarely does an issue in the public forum speak to the heart so poignantly as protecting children with special needs. Governor Sarah Palin offers compassion and concrete help to those of us hungry for information, support and solutions,” said Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a Friday press release.

“Why does Sarah have such a beautiful perspective? Because she sees the value, necessity, and joy inherent in every human life,” she continued.

No one is ever promised an easy time, but life is always beautiful and it is always not just the right choice, but the only rational choice. To see an unborn life and consider killing it an acceptable (let alone good) option is to be soaked in our modern Age of Lies – to be emotionally crippled by despair.

We have no more urgent task and no more noble calling than to restore the respect for life to the center of our civilization’s existence – it was what we were built on, in firm rejection of the Greco-Roman world’s cruelty and inhumanity, it was Christian civilization which asserted that each life is important and must be respected. We have to get back to that – and only by getting back to that can we really cure all our social ills because if there is no right to life, there really is no right to anything; and if killing unborn children isn’t wrong, then nothing is wrong.

This ad is to run in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. If McCain won’t do it, then the National Republican Trust PAC, will.

Go here for the scoop.

I think we can say that the constitution reflected a enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this county that continues to this day.

And he also believes that the Supreme Court should decide what the government must do for you (as defined by Obama and other lefties, of course):

The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.

The man believes that the Founders got it wrong – that they didn’t set up a system Obama would prefer; a system, that is, where redistribution is the name of the game. Obama wants a government which decides the outcomes of life – and it must be kept in mind that if a government is going to “fix” the outcomes, it cannot allow people to be free. Obama is a socialist through and through, even if he refuses the label – but, then again, most socialists in the United States refuse that label, too, and insist we call them “progressives”.

Americans: do we want a President who thinks that the Founders got it wrong? Do we want a President who sees the coercive club of government as a magic wand to make us all happy? If we do, then Obama will be elected next week – if, on the other hand, we prefer to actually remain American, then we’ll vote for McCain.

A week of campaigning left to go and the Conventional Wisdom is that its all wrapped up – Obama has won; our MSM – ever solicitous of GOPers – is essentially advising us to not bother voting as there’s nothing we can do to alter the result. We’re getting stories alleging back-biting in the McCain camp while other stories claim that Obama has already started working not on his acceptance speech, but on his inaugural speech.

So, GOPers, will you stay home? As for me, when I see polls showing a 15 percentage point part ID variance between what was seen in 2006 and what the poll claims for 2008, I get a bit concerned that – just perhaps – the MSM isn’t telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Given this, I do plan on voting on the 4th – some how or another, I prefer to have the voters decide who is the next President, not public opinion polls. In fact, truth be known, I’m feeling in a tremendously good mood – everything is against us, except the truth. I’d rather be with truth – even if I suffer a temporary setback.

Discuss this and anything else which comes to mind.

Just part of the process of winding up the successful liberation of Iraq – warning off Syria:

U.S. military helicopters launched an extremely rare attack Sunday on Syrian territory close to the border with Iraq, killing eight people in a strike the government in Damascus condemned as “serious aggression.”

A U.S. military official said the raid by special forces targeted the foreign fighter network that travels through Syria into Iraq. The Americans have been unable to shut the network down in the area because Syria was out of the military’s reach.

“We are taking matters into our own hands,” the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.

The attack came just days after the commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an “uncontrolled” gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

Of course, there is the prospect that this was done with the tacit consent of the Syrian government – now that Iraq’s liberation is assured, Syria probably doesn’t want a large number of unemployed jihadists hanging around. One way or the other, the Syrian pipeline into the anti-democratic forces inside Iraq is being shut down.

Now, McCain would have authorized this attack, too; does anyone out there really think that Obama would have done it? If you sincerely think Obama would have, then you’re rather naive, but have justification for backing Obama in your blindness…if, on the other hand, you understand that Obama wouldn’t do this because he would be in Damascus begging the Syrians to be nice and you still plan on voting for Obama, then you’re a fool.

From Newsbusters:

In a Fox News Sunday panel segment on the media’s pro-Obama and anti-McCain bias, Juan Williams revealed journalists were in such a swoon for Barack Obama that during the primaries “what you saw was that the executive editors and the top people at the networks were all rushing to Obama events, bringing their children, celebrating it, saying they were, there’s this part of history.” Though Williams, a former Washington Post reporter who is now a NPR news analyst and regular analyst for Fox News, maintained “there’s no question in my mind the media has been more supportive of Senator Obama…”

Its not the MSM bias which really bothers us – its the dishonesty in their claim to be unbiased which chaps our hide. If the MSMers would just come out and say, “we’re liberals and we’re going to report the news from a liberal point of view”, we’d stop writing about media bias. The MSM doesn’t do this, of course, because they have always been afraid of losing market share – of course, they are losing it massively these days, anyways. So, maybe now its time they’ll just fess up and thus allow overtly conservative media to rise up in competition?

Never seen a more perfect illustration of the liberal disconnect from reality:

…the very visibility of Barack Obama – let alone his candidacy for the most powerful and, before Bush, the most esteemed job in the world – creates a category crisis of epic proportions. He not only mouths a rhetoric of transcending division, but is himself a seamless genetic integration of what should be immiscible. The decent, God-fearing racist must be plagued by unanswerable questions: What is this incomprehensible mutation of badness and goodness? How can the same person contain that with which I identify and which I despise? What does that make me?

In the course of the presidential campaign, we have heard Republican ads and seen GOP viral emails that pose more rational-seeming derivatives of these questions: Who is Barack Obama? Do we actually know him? Doesn’t he sound kind of uppity and elitist? Is he a Christian or a Muslim? Is he really like us? Didn’t he grow up in one of those anti-American parts of America, like Hawaii?

By way of concluding, I want to emphasize that most Americans are not consciously racist, and would abhor the prejudice and ignorance manifested by the good white Christians cited above. But as Drew Westen and other researchers have shown, the majority of people – black as well as white – harbor an unconscious negative bias against anyone perceived as black. At a deep level, most of us make use of racial categories to navigate the world, manage its vague and unseen threats, and define our worth.

And why should we expect otherwise? Every person in this country is embedded in a culture and history founded on racist beliefs, practices, and emotions. There is no place to stand outside this psychological and social reality. It saturates our national sense of self and structures our neural networks.

What is possible, however, is to acknowledge and remain mindful of this ugly and disturbing legacy so that we can minimize its influence on how we treat others, and how we elect leaders to public office. And, as the enthusiastic throngs of citizens, here and abroad, attest, it is even possible to move beyond “tolerance” – to embrace and celebrate the fluidity of categories, cultures, and identities that Obama’s candidacy has come to symbolize.

Glad to know I’m not consciously racist – as long as its only my subconscious controlled by my religious indoctrination, then its something which liberals can save me from. What a load of nonsense.

To believe that we are a people founded upon racist beliefs takes a great deal of self-enforced ignorance – not just of history, but of people in the real world. I’d like to actually see the steps in a controlled setting where someone goes from a person able to take the world as it is to being a person who constructs a fantasy life based on the world as one wishes it is. Just how does a person – presumably either non-racist, himself, or at least so wise as to be able to control it (thinking like a liberal here, for a moment, boys and girls) – who has lived among people come to such a negative, dishonest and hate-filled view of them? Getting to the bottom of this, I think, would help us explain the phenomena of people like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao and allow us to set up correctives against any such things happening in the future.

Rather than living in the real world where people are, well, people and do good and bad based upon choice and where our flawed nature is inherent in our Fall from grace, liberals live in the Alternate Universe where the United States is nothing but a grand, wicked, racist experiment in how to be as murderously greedy as possible. Continuing in this liberal mindset is the liberal idea that they, because they are smarter than the average person, have figured it all out and thus have a mission – to save us benighted bigots from ourselves. They have to figure out – by hook or crook – some means of obtaining and retaining power over us so that they may slowly remake us in the liberal image. We’ll never be free from racism, of course, but we’ll at least be conditioned by liberalism to the point where we recognize our inherent racism and are thus willing to make amends for it (to be freed from racism we’d have to be liberal, but to be liberal we’d have to be smart enough to already know that liberalism is the way to go; if you’re over the age of 18 and are not liberal, then you are inherently not as smart as liberals, and thus you’ll never figure out – on your own – that being racist is bad).

If Obama looses a week from Tuesday, liberals will say that it was because of racism – with the more paranoid among them convincing themselves that it was a racist conspiracy to defraud an electorate which, finally, was seeing the non-racist light but which was thwarted in its liberal desire by wicked men who want to keep racism alive so that they can continue to be rich, and evil, and rape the environment, and destroy all life on this planet, because they are stupid, and evil. But the fact of the matter will be, if Obama loses, that he’ll lose because he’s a pinheaded pinko of no accomplishments who has no business running for President to begin with – as he, himself, noted shortly after he was elected to the United States Senate. In a center/right America the chances of a kook lefty like Obama getting elected President are thin – and the only reason he’s gotten as far as he has is due to a successful program of slander against the GOP coupled with a massive boost from a slavishly devoted MSM. This might carry the dead cat across the finish line, and it might not – but if Obama loses it won’t be because of racism any more than if he wins it is because people suddenly feel that we need a post-racial healer to make us all better.

Meanwhile, though, we’ll be stuck with people like the author of the quoted piece – people who can’t see what is right in front of them, but who presume to tell us what ails us, and how we are to fix ourselves.

The MSM has been trying the tactic of non-reporting – in other words, having failed to produce a campaign-killing gaffe from governor Palin (while hiding a half dozen from Biden which, in a normal year, would have already finished off Obama’s campaign), they are trying to just ignore her and hope she goes away. Well, she ain’t:

The bundled-up crowd of nearly 15,000 trudged in line through Friday morning’s gray light.

From retirees to babies swaddled in blankets, they traveled from all over the state. Vendors hawked buttons and T-shirts; people laughed and interacted with neighbors in line. Many wiggled out of work or school to be there, to experience history — to see Sarah Palin.

“I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life,” said Charlotte Christ, a 37-year-old cook from Buffalo. “But Sarah’s one of us. You can hear it in her voice.”

Christ and her husband, Shawn, have two children, ages 2 and 4. They are drawn to the Alaskan governor’s conservative values and persona as a Washington outsider.

“They finally found one who talks to me,” Shawn Christ said.

About 4,000 people got tickets to see the Republican vice-presidential candidate and another 11,000 or so showed up and took their chances.

“I believe in her,” said Ryan Haggard, 19, who traveled from Kansas City to be in line at 5:45 a.m. “She has true conservative values and wants for us to keep our money in our own pockets.”

Some who traveled to see Palin felt a personal connection with her family life — particularly the raising of her son Trig, who has Down syndrome.

“She stands up for children, especially those with special needs,” said 70-year-old Ben Southerland, from Kimberling City, who also has a son with Down syndrome. “And she stands up for women — not females — but real women who raise children.”

People are getting a bit angry, by the way. Angry at how the MSM jumped on Palin’s wardrobe, but has never even asked how much Obama’s suits cost. Angry at how Palin is slandered as dumb while Biden can’t even open his mouth without making an ass of himself. Angry that one of ours is being savaged by MSM elites in order to help a political elite.

I’ve got news for the elite – we glory in Sarah Palin. We have love and respect for John McCain – but governor Palin is someone we all know. There is one like her – and often more than one – in each of our lives. A no-nonsense woman who takes care of business without complaining and without any expectation that any other than God will appreciate what she’s done. For women, Palin is a fellow warrior in the struggle for family; for men, Palin is our wives and daughters, we’re awestruck at what she’s able to do. We’d rather have Sarah Palin running the show than any dimwitted professional Senator from Delaware or pinheaded pinko from Chicago.

You have bitten off far more than you can chew when you go after governor Palin the way you have – all you do is draw us more tightly around her and make us more determined than ever win.

You ain’t seen nothing, yet – as Roger Kimball notes and quotes:

For the last few decades, the West has been pumping money into economic backwaters, taking care first to assure everyone that they were “emerging” markets. But what if it turns out that they only seemed to be emerging when propped up by easy capital, in the absence of which some or all of them reverted to being what they always had been, i.e., submerging markets? What then?

“Europe,” Evans-Pritchard observes, has already had its first foretaste of what this may mean. Iceland’s demise has left them nursing likely losses of $74bn (£47bn). The Germans have lost $22bn.” Demise? Iceland? Well, economically, it pretty much amounts to that: as a professor at the university of Iceland put it earlier this month, “Iceland is bankrupt. . . . . The IMF has to come and rescue us.”

But what happened in Iceland was only the beginning. The crash of so-called “emerging markets” is sending shock waves throughout Europe and parts of Asia. Evans-Pritchard sketches the dismal picture:

Austria’s bank exposure to emerging markets is equal to 85pc of GDP – with a heavy concentration in Hungary, Ukraine, and Serbia – all now queuing up (with Belarus) for rescue packages from the International Monetary Fund.

Exposure is 50pc of GDP for Switzerland, 25pc for Sweden, 24pc for the UK, and 23pc for Spain. The US figure is just 4pc. America is the staid old lady in this drama.

Amazingly, Spanish banks alone have lent $316bn to Latin America, almost twice the lending by all US banks combined ($172bn) to what was once the US backyard. Hence the growing doubts about the health of Spain’s financial system – already under stress from its own property crash – as Argentina spirals towards another default, and Brazil’s currency, bonds and stocks all go into freefall.

Broadly speaking, the US and Japan sat out the emerging market credit boom. The lending spree has been a European play – often using dollar balance sheets, adding another ugly twist as global “deleveraging” causes the dollar to rocket. Nowhere has this been more extreme than in the ex-Soviet bloc.

The region has borrowed $1.6 trillion in dollars, euros, and Swiss francs. A few dare-devil homeowners in Hungary and Latvia took out mortgages in Japanese yen. They have just suffered a 40pc rise in their debt since July. Nobody warned them what happens when the Japanese carry trade goes into brutal reverse, as it does when the cycle turns. . . .

Russia too is in the eye of the storm, despite its energy wealth – or because of it. The cost of insuring Russian sovereign debt through credit default swaps (CDS) surged to 1,200 basis points last week, higher than Iceland’s debt before Götterdammerung struck Reykjavik.

The markets no longer believe that the spending structure of the Russian state is viable as oil threatens to plunge below $60 a barrel. The foreign debt of the oligarchs ($530bn) has surpassed the country’s foreign reserves. Some $47bn has to be repaid over the next two months.

And this leaves out China – which must export massive amounts of cheap consumer goods in order to keep its financial system afloat; cut those exports just a bit – as will certainly happen in the current downturn – and we mat see a Chinese economic meltdown as they are unable to pay their debts, bribe their oligarchs and pay for their military buildup all at once. Something will have to give. Why worry? Because China’s government made a deal with China’s people after Tienamen Square – “leave us in charge, and we’ll shepherd you to economic prosperity”. China falls into economic depression and all bets are off.

Now more than ever we need to elect John McCain – with this economic tsunami raging around the world, we need a President who understands that taxes have to be kept low, that business have to be free to innovate, that the American worker has to be free to compete, that regulations have to protect the public while not straightjacketing business. McCain will be that sort of President – Obama, on the other hand, is already wedded to the Euro-trash socialist model which has placed Europe’s economic head on the chopping block.

Democrats will certainly be ashamed at these people who failed to risk their all for Obama:

Thirteen campaign workers for Barack Obama yesterday yanked their voter registrations and ballots in Ohio after being warned by a prosecutor that temporary residents can’t vote in the battleground state.

A dozen staffers – including Obama Ohio spokeswoman Olivia Alair and James Cadogan, who recently joined Team Obama – signed a form letter asking the Franklin County elections board to pull their names from the rolls.

The letter – a copy of which was obtained by palestra.net, a Fox News affiliate – came a day after prosecutor Ron O’Brien publicly urged out-of-state campaign workers for both Obama and John McCain to “examine your conscience” before the elections board beings begins opening absentee ballots today.

Earlier in the week, O’Brien spoke with lawyers for both camps and urged them to make sure their staffs met permanent-residency rules, or face possible felony charges.

Come on, Obamabots; what is a little jail time compared to the prospect that Obama might not win Ohio? Surely you can fall on your swords – suppose Obama loses? What worth would there be in even so much as being alive in a non-Obama America? What price Hopenchange?