You can go back and forth over the Sarah Barracuda resume and her handling by the press, but it's clear that John McCain scored a twofer with her nomination: 1) Throwing the Obama camp into dissarray; and 2) Eliminating the serious threat that Bob Barr would draw off sufficient conservatives to bulk up the Libertarian vote and perhaps cost McCain a battleground state or two. Here's the evidence: In Georgia , Bob Barr's June/July high of 6-8% is now down to the 2-3% range. Meanwhile, Libertarian Senatorial candidate Allen Buckley is moving up to 4%. In New Hampshire , Bob Barr's 7-11% in July has dwindled to 2% in September (with Nader eclipsing him at 4%), while Libertarian Senatorial candidate Ken Blevens is also moving up to 3%. In Arizona , where Bob Barr had polled as high as 7% in June he's now down to 1%. In Ohio , where some polls had Bob Barr as high as 6-7% in June, he is now struggling to hold 1%. Why is this happening? Barr's entire campaign stra...

... when former campaign strategist Mark Penn condemns the media coverage of Sarah Palin : I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates. And that’s going to subject them to people concluding that they’re giving her a tougher time. Now, the media defense would be, “Yeah, we looked at these other candidates who have been in public life at an earlier time.” What happened here very clearly is that the controversy over Palin led to 37 million Americans tuning into a vice-presidential speech, something that is unprecedented, because they wanted to see for themselves. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them. Let's see what we've got here: Point one: Hillary avoids being used as an Obama counter-weapon against Sarah Palin . Point two: Mark Penn, noted Democratic strategist and Clintonista , criticizes the media's treatment of Sarah Palin. I...

From Linda Keenan at Burbia [with h/t A Secondhand Conjecture ]: I called my husband hours before the Vice Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin was to speak before the Republican convention. I asked him how many kids she had. Five, he said without missing a beat. How many does McCain have? No clue, he said. Romney? He caught on quick (he's used to these pop-quiz phone calls). He said, well, wait, Palin's been in the news, blah blah, and I said, save your breath. I had no clue either just how many kids John McCain had, and I had absolutely no excuse: I had written TV news for a decade when four of his kids were still quite young. I probably wrote about the candidate, oh, a hundred times, ranging from tiny mentions to longer stories. And why didn't I know how many kids he has? Because, of course, he is a man. And no one asks those questions of a man. If you are wondering, he has a total of seven kids, and the four youngest were born during his early days in the Senate. How did h...

I keep seeing so many pundits and commenters trying to grapple with Senator John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his VP, and the dichotomous nature of their speeches at the GOP convention, that I thought I'd explain what is going on. Here's what you need to know: 1) John McCain intends to win the Presidency; all decisions are subordinated to that end. 2) He realizes that no conventional strategy stands a good chance at overcoming Senator Barack Obama's momentum, and that he first has to throw the Obama campaign off its game before he can play his own. 3) As Obama rejected the Clinton 50% plus one strategy early on for the Howard Dean 50-state strategy, McCain has rejected the typically Karl Rove strategy of staking his bid on cultural war and the war on terro in the battleground states. Instead, McCain plans a major departure from previous strategies. Here's some background. Traditionally, both major candidates run to their base in the primaries and back to the ce...

Besides, I always wanted to be on mike w.'s blogroll, and I figure this photo-shopped image of Sarah Palin will get me in. And from Jim Fryar at Real World Libertarian [I can't believe I had to hear it first from Australia], the best Sarah Palin-related joke so far: Q. How could they have kept the Palin pregnancy out of the paper? A. Say that John Edwards was the father!

Truly, I suspect that what we have seen over the past week would have happened no matter what the name of the VP candidate Senator John McCain selected. But he didn't select anybody: he selected an evangelical social conservative with some libertarian leanings who is obviously ambitious, politically astute, but hardly immune to miscalculations and outright blunders. Aside from all that: he selected a woman. Obviously Alaska is too far away either for McCain's vetting team or the press to be able to do much research, because the people criticizing this pick have more credibility and accuracy problems than you can... Well, metaphors fail me here. Let's see, first the far-left (excuse me, progressive and liberal) bloggers ran with the story that Palin had faked a pregnancy with a Downs Syndrome child in order to cover up her daughter's own pregnancy, announcing her grandchild as her own daughter to avoid the shame and embarrassment of it all. Ironically, other than pho...

Downstairs in my house tonight my five-year-old grandson, presented to us by our eldest daughter with the assistance of the long-absent man we refer to as "the sperm donor" is sleeping. I love my grandson as much as life itself, but if I am to be hooked up to a polygraph, abortion was very much on the table when a twenty-year-old with no visible means of support got pregnant. For both wrong and right reasons that you have no need to know, that didn't happen. But the experience and the people I met during that experience taught me two things: 1) Abortion rights are essential to a modern free society. 2) People who oppose abortion rights are not necessarily my enemies. Mike Matthews had a post up the other day about whether or not you could be anti-gun and pro-second-amendment at the same time. I don't know about that one. But what I do know is that some of the most supportive, caring people I met during that tough time of our life were actually so-called Pro-Life ...

I'm not even going to post about either of these stories beyond this: If you want to read about progressive and liberal Democrats tying themselves up into knots trying to avoid sounding like they actually purchased subscriptions to celebrity tabloids, then visit Delaware Liberal and look through the bars. [Please note that both at DL and the DKos these are the same people who ran with the completely unfounded Sussex County story of a young Muslim girl being harassed over Barack Obama's religious affiliation, and who--even when the story was discovered to lack foundation--did damnall little to set right the avalanche of abuse they lit off.] If you want to see that the Democrats have now fully invited God into the political arena on their side (after spending years condemning the GOPers--and rightly so--for doing just that), then visit Becky the Girl in Short Shorts . But in both cases take a barf bag with you. From one family's potential personal tragedy to the ongoing tra...