Election '08: Cartoons, Old tunes, "Change"

This is what I call good-old fashioned American entrepreneurialism, and it is timely and subtle at the same time: The McCain/Palin ’08 Lipstick Kiss Button!

There is a Bumper Sticker, too!

I’m going to order a dozen, because that’s just cute and fun. I’m going to keep this at top, and the “running update” begins below, latest stuff first!

Read this: Just read it – it’s wonderful. (H/T)

The baby heard the thud, got scared, turned her head quickly into the side of the stroller and is now inhaling all the air in the room in order to scream the scream of angry baby anguish in an echoing cafeteria. While she’s still inhaling, the soda spreads rapidly under the chairs of everyone in a ten yard area.

I almost miss those days. Okay, I do!

New coffee blends from Mystic Monk Coffee, the best coffee I’ve ever had. Check it out (see right hand sidebar) – Midnight Vigils Blend – a fair trade organic coffee that sounds heavenly! But the Hermit’s Bold Blend is the one I want to try right away: I need that jumpstart in the morning! Seriously, folks if you have not yet tried it, that is some great coffee. My favorite, Colombian Dark Roast – with Hazelnut a near second. Try the coffee, help support a growing monastic house!

Will the last one out of England please turn off the lights. How sad.

In the path of Hurricane Ike: prayers requested

In case you didn’t see: My latest piece at PJM, on the psychologists who are going to train us on the environment.

The Catholic Vote: Quite a video 10:17 PM

Father Dies Saving Son’s Life. That the 20 year old son has Down Syndrome is really only incidental to this gut-wrenching story. But you might say this son’s parents had saved his life, twice. Kathryn Lopez writes that Levin began his program tonight with a tribute to Thomas S. Vander Woude, who is apparently well known in Catholic circles around DC. His son, Joseph, whose life he saved, is in hospital with double pneumonia and does not yet know his father has died. How very sad, and how very noble. 7:44 PM

Some Dancing fun Ellen and Michele Obama. That’s cute. 7:22 PM

Matt Damon apparently does not know how to use search engines to “learn” about whether or not Sarah Palin tried to ban books or if she believes dinosaurs walked the earth 4,000 years ago. You can find that stuff pretty easily, but Damon is afraid that she might be really stupid. Also her executive experience scares him more than Obama’s lack of same. You can’t make this up. Also, I didn’t see it but my husband was watching CNN yesterday and saw a report a guy admitting he made the “dinosaur” stuff up “for fun.” Has anyone seen that? – 7:05 PM

More on that Cartoon Obama lifted for a speech. Lorie Byrd makes a pertinent point:

Democrats criticized Palin for repeating lines written by Bush’s speechwriter. Maybe they wouldn’t have criticized her if they had been written by a cartoonist.

Lorie has another update about Obama’s suggestion that it matters who writes your stuff. You had to know that criticism would come back to bite them. They’ve sort of gotten it all wrong, bang out of the box, as regards dealing with Palin, haven’t they? 5:51 PM

Ah, here is a real issue, (H/T): Florida Voters will have to have matching ID! There’s a notion that oughta be picked up in every state. It always blows my mind that I’m not asked for my ID before I vote. 3:35 PM

Now this ad is better: A point worth making. 3:30 PM

Dreaming of Palin? Remember when the Dems were gushing about “Dreaming of Bill Clinton”? I had a friend who once dreamed about Clinton she also dreamed about Limbaugh and was appalled both times. I haven’t dreamed about her, but apparently Palin is in some folks’ heads:

One Obama-supporting colleague dreamed she had urged her young son to kill Palin with a string bean. Another dreamed she was at a fashion show and Palin served her crème fraîche on little scooped corn chips. A third says, “In the Sarah Palin dream I keep having, she has superhuman powers but is not really a person at all. In fact, she is more like the weather with glasses and an up-do, pushing clouds around and pitching lightning bolts.”

Geez. As Obama would say, These people! EVERYTHING is starting to seem like a cartoon! 3:03 PM

I’m saying lay off Biden on this “stand up, Chuck” gaffe yesterday. It was just a mistake and the guy seemed genuinely upset with himself that he’d made it. Let it go. I heard Rush really overdoing it, today. That’s as dumb as Obama’s faux “innocent remark” yesterday. Can we talk about how we’re going to pay for heating oil this winter? 2:56

Waiting for Camille Paglia’s take on the Dem reaction to Palin? I was! And she writes a great piece with her usual staggering depth, width and breadth. Read it all; she brings much-needed honesty to the abortion issue. Really. I don’t agree with her on many things, bur her frankness is refreshing and a must read, and she has done the best job of breaking down the appeal of Sarah Palin, and why she is GOOD for women, that I have yet read. Ann Althouse seems to agree. 2:54 PM

Hmmm: Palin is filling the gap for feminists who do not like the NOW model. Yeah, I’d say that’s about right. 2:46 PM

Instapundit has an interesting letter from an Alaskan 2:45 PM

This is good: Michael Gerson on what Trig Palin’s prominence may mean:

Of the cases of Down syndrome diagnosed by pre-natal testing each year, about 90 percent are eliminated by abortion…some expect this increased screening to reduce the number of Down syndrome births far lower than the 5,500 we see today, perhaps to less than 1,000.
…
This is properly called eugenic abortion — the ending of “imperfect” lives to remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence. And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of the disabled.

You’ll want to read it all. 2:40 PM

I like this fun collection of emails and anecdotes posted by Jay Nordlinger. 1:51 PM

I gotta be honest: I don’t like the McCain “lipstick” response ad. I don’t like their bringing Katie Couric into it talking about sexism in the campaign, especially because they don’t make it clear that Couric is talking about how the Obama campaign was treating Clinton. Of course, that does emphasize the fact that the Obama Camp likes to haul out the ‘shrill angry woman’ stereotypes, but all-in-all, I don’t like the ad, and I agree with Kathryn Lopez at NRO: we don’t need it; it may be “mirroring” what the Democrats do, but it comes perilously close to going beyond “mirroring” and becoming a campaign song in the key of whine. 1:46 PM

Gerald Vanderleun is saying Obama made not one but two sexist jokes yesterday; that he was not calling John McCain an “stinky old fish” but ummm…something else. Ewwwwwww. Please let me think he was talking about McCain! I really don’t want think any presidential candidate would be that koi or underhanded. Then again, he did give Hillary the passive-aggressive finger and get away with it. Oh, get your minds out of the gutter, that’s not what I meant! Sheesh. These people! 1:06 PM

A lot of readers have sent me this cartoon, today, but Bob Owens is the first blogger I’ve seen really running with it. Did Obama quote a political cartoon in the prelude to his “lipstick on a pig” gaffe from a political cartoon?

Obama has already been accused of stealing lines from Deval Patrick, Mario Coumo, and Cesar Chavez, and chose a Vice Presidential candidate with his own history of oratory theft. If Barack Obama once again appropriated someone else’s words, he is going to have some trouble finding credible people to explain it away this time.

Now, one can’t help but wag a little about plagiarism and Biden’s old history with it, but seriously, I don’t know how big a deal it is; I think if Obama wants to quote cartoons, he should have used it differently, though: “you know, I saw a cartoon today, and it said ‘blahblahblah’ isn’t that great? Yeah, that’s a CARTOON making sense…” or something like that. All in all, I think he should have simply rethought that whole segment of his talk, since none of it worked, (take my poll here, and he’s given the opposition a chance to laugh at him. Laughter, we all know, is deadly. 12:57 PM