So, with the media coronation of Barack Obama as the nominee for the Democrats, as a result of his repeated victories, I’d like to raise the question again about the state of the Clinton Brand.

How badly has the Clinton Brand suffered from this campaign? If Hillary somehow manages to pull of getting the nomination, will that repair the damage done? What if she doesn’t get the nomination, is it permanently destroyed?

The location of the library has now been determined.

Southern Methodist University in Dallas has been selected as the home for U.S. President George W. Bush’s presidential library, the school said on Friday.

The university had been widely seen as the front-runner to house the facilities which will consist of a library for the Bush administration’s documents, a museum and a public policy institute.

Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale University School of Architecture, will design the buildings.

I have to say I am very pleased with the selection of Robert A.M. Stern as the architect. I met Mr. Stern several years ago when I was an undergraduate architecture student, and admire his work. I look forward to seeing the design proposal.

Ha! I like it.

Hillary Rodham Clinton accused Democratic presidential rival Barack Obama of political plagiarism Thursday night and said he represented “change you can Xerox.” Obama dismissed the charge out of hand, adding in a campaign debate, “What we shouldn’t be doing is tearing each other down, we should be lifting the country up.”

The exchange marked an unusually pointed moment in an otherwise civil encounter in the days before March 4 primaries in Texas and Ohio — contests that even some of Clinton’s supporters say she must win to sustain her campaign for the White House.

UPDATE: More Obama/Rezko details…

By now, you’ve probably heard news of the New York Times smear job against John McCain. It is such a ridiculously poor piece one has to question the motives of the New York Times for even going forward with it. With McCain pretty much securing the nomination, it’s inevitable that he’ll be the target of baseless smear attacks…

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In the meantime, discuss.

UPDATE: Wow, even Alan Colmes concedes this is a non-story.

Not even his supporters can name a single legislative accomplishment of Barack Obama’s.

[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=SZTo0iGc_Dw%5D

Accuracy In Media calls our attention to Obama’s communist mentor:

In his biography of Barack Obama, David Mendell writes about Obama’s life as a “secret smoker” and how he “went to great lengths to conceal the habit.” But what about Obama’s secret political life? It turns out that Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was a communist.

In his books, Obama admits attending “socialist conferences” and coming into contact with Marxist literature. But he ridicules the charge of being a “hard-core academic Marxist,” which was made by his colorful and outspoken 2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Alan Keyes. However, through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his “poetry” and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just “Frank.” The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member. What’s more, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations.

[…]

Obama’s communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.

AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a “Global Poverty Act” designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.

Will the media report on this connection (which is explained in much greater detail in the story) or will it ignore it? I think we all know the answer.

Sadly, I doubt Obama’s supporters, or a majority of Democrats would see a problem with Obama’s connections to communist and socialist groups.

When groups like the ACLU challenge the terrorist surveillance program in the courts, we get yet another example of the left actively trying to make it more difficult to fight terror. I’m glad to report that the Supreme Court rejected the ACLU’s appeal of their challenge of the program, but I can’t help noting their bizarre rationale for the lawsuit:

The ACLU sued on behalf of itself, other lawyers, reporters and scholars, arguing that the program was illegal and that they had been forced to alter how they communicate with foreigners who were likely to have been targets of the wiretapping.

So, I guess the ACLU regularly communicates with terrorists overseas? Is there an Al Qaeda chapter of the ACLU?

Why are so many on the left determined to stop the war on terror? Why are they hellbent on lying about the program in order to stop it? I just heard that moron Keith Olbermann claim that the program allows the government to listen in on phone calls of Americans in this country when it doesn’t.

Byron York over at The Corner notes that Obama’s use of my governor’s campaign rhetoric is more than just an isolated incident… there’s actually a pattern of “lifting” phrases verbatim without attribution.

The debate will continue about how important this is, but as a Massachusetts resident and voter, who experienced Deval Patrick‘s empty rhetoric and saw first hand how people were fooled by it, I think this is a very big deal. Despite Deval Patrick‘s rhetoric about hope in 2006, he has since become one of the most ineffective and incompetent governors Massachusetts has ever seen. Even some of his most ardent supporters from the campaign have questioned his so-called leadership as governor.

So, along comes Barack Obama, who isn’t simply regurgitating the same themes Deval Patrick used, but phrases word for word… Let’s be honest about Barack Obama’s support… it’s not because of support for specific policies, or because of any leadership abilities… his support is largely superficial, and is a result of his powerful speech giving talent and rhetoric. Now people are learning that even his rhetoric is unoriginal… or more accurately: stolen.

Obama supporters can pretend this isn’t a big deal, but had this not come out than Obama would continue to use Deval Patrick‘s words without attribution. I knew from the beginning of Obama’s presidential campaign that Deval’s gubernatorial campaign would be used as a model… a microcosm of sorts for Obama’s national campaign… and it definitely has been. Without a doubt.

Even though Deval Patrick, who has endorsed Obama, has defended Obama’s use of his words without attribution, that doesn’t make this situation any less significant, or the actual stealing of the words any less fraudulent.

What Deval Patrick lacked in leadership he compensated for in rhetoric and his speaking ability. Barack Obama is attempting to pull the same scam on the American people, but what he’s doing is worse because he was using someone else’s words and would have continued had the origins not been revealed. Obama knew where the words came from. His speeches are scripted. He knew he was using someone else’s words. He knew he wasn’t crediting the source. Obama is a fraud. He defended the effectiveness of his words by plagiarizing Deval’s.

The sad thing is that so many on the left won’t care.

You probably don’t know this, but Nick Hornby is my favorite fiction writer. If you haven’t read him before, you should. If you’ve seen the movie High Fidelity, he wrote the book it was adapted from.

Anyway, his most recent novel, Slam, is about a teenaged boy (who is obsessed with Tony Hawk and skateboarding) who gets his girlfriend pregnant — that’s a short way of explaining the story. Anyway, Nick Hornby has a blog, and a while back he wrote a blog entry that I thought may be of interest to you.

[Another] article in the Guardian [link] about how movies depicting pregnancy are somehow anti-abortion: after ‘Knocked Up’, it’s the new (and very charming) ‘Juno’ that is in trouble […] “Hollywood heroines who don’t consider abortion are of a generation taking its rights for granted,” is the misleading subtitle of Hadley Freeman’s piece. Actually, sixteen-year-old Juno does consider abortion. She goes to an abortion clinic and then changes her mind. I suspect that considering abortion isn’t enough, though – Juno needs to go through with an abortion, if she’s going to keep columnists off her case.

My book ‘Slam’, which is about a sixteen-year-old father, also got attacked on these grounds in at least one American review, so I have a special interest in this debate. Alicia, the boy’s ex-girlfriend, is determined not to have an abortion because she read pro-life propaganda on the internet, and can’t be persuaded to rethink her decision. I would like Hadley Freeman, my critic and all the others to explain, patiently and carefully, to Judd Apatow (the writer of ‘Knocked Up’, Diablo Cody (‘Juno’) and myself how we can write about pregnancy and unplanned parenthood without causing offence.

Nick Hornby is liberal, and obviously supports abortion, so I couldn’t help being amused by his blog entry. I remember thinking when I read Slam, or saw Knocked Up or Juno that some pro-abortion groups or individuals would take issue with the fact that in each of these stories which involved unintended pregnancies the mother-to-be made the conscious decision to keep the baby. Hadley Freeman, who wrote the Guardian article says, “It is surely no coincidence that these films are emerging from a country that has had eight years of ultra-conservative Republican rule.” Ahh, yes, how Republicans have such an impact on Hollywood!

Continuing in his blog entry, Hornby further refutes Freeman:

Should ‘Slam’, ‘Knocked Up’ and ‘Juno’ all end a third of the way through, with a visit to a clinic? Are these people really saying that you mustn’t write about pregnancy because you’re somehow letting the side down

Now, I’ve recently been reading a lot of fiction, and seeing movies more often than I have in the past. I expect that sometimes books that don’t even have an agenda will have things in them I don’t agree with. I’ve never gotten hot and bothered over a book or a movie because a character had an abortion. Neither of the two movies or the book had an agenda against abortion. Their stories were still entertaining and I don’t see why anyone who is pro-abortion can’t enjoy them just because abortion was not chosen by the characters involved.

If abortion is really about “choice” (as the left says it is) then the choice of life shouldn’t be seen as a setback to the movement be it in life or in entertainment. Though I guess some people think it is. Can the pro-abortion movement not find happiness in the “choice” of life? Apparently not, if they get so worked up over the choice of life in fiction.

Ben Stein on was on “Kudlow & Company,” yesterday, and gave his views on Barack Obama’s economic plan:

“Mr. Obama could become president and derail everything because his understanding of economics is 100 percent wrong. … I must say I’m so scared about Mr. Obama becoming president. I can hardly tell you.

[…]

[Obama] understands nothing. He wants to shut down the oil companies, take away their profits. Kill every state teacher’s pension fund that’s invested in XOM [Exxon Mobil]. I am terrified of this guy. Either somebody has got to wise him up or he has to wise up himself or he will be real dangerous.”

Bad on the economy. Bad on fighting terror. But hey, at least he can give a good speech, right?