McCain Can Still Win

From the NY Times:

...For starters, the American people like to have checks and balances. With predictions that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will grow their liberal power bases in the House and the Senate, more Americans than reflected in various polls may decide to apply the brakes to an Obama presidency.
And I know you’ve heard this before, experience does matter. Joe Biden may have inadvertently made that case for John McCain when he recently said that the world will test Barack Obama in six months. “The world is looking,” he said. “Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
By saying this, Mr. Biden planted a seed in some voters’ minds that terrorists, rogue nations or even a country like Russia may try to take advantage of Mr. Obama’s inexperience. The implication some may take away from Mr. Biden’s flat-out guarantee is that this would not happen to the combat veteran and vastly more experienced John McCain. (more)

Biden Gets Asked REAL Questions!

From DoctorBulldog:

The Barack Obama campaign called Barbara West’s interview with Sen. Joe Biden unprofessional and combative.
The veteran WFTV-Channel 9 anchor-reporter says she asked pointed questions and respects Sen. Biden, who is Sen. Obama’s running mate.
In a call to me Friday evening, West said of Biden: “I have a great deal of respect for him. I have a great deal of respect for Sen. Obama. We are given four minutes of a satellite window for these interviews. Four precious minutes. I got right down to it and, yes, I think I asked him some pointed questions. These are questions that are rolling about right now and questions that need to be asked. I don’t think I was rude or inconsiderate to him. I think I was probing and maybe tough. I can’t believe that in all of his years in politics, and all of his campaigning and such, that he hasn’t run into some tough questions before. He’s certainly up to it in giving good answers.” (more)

Something Smells

While the headline could easily apply to the Obama campaign, (donations to ACORN, questionable donations from domestic and foreign contributers, outright lies in their ad campaign) this is something different:
The Stink in Farts Controls Blood Pressure

A smelly rotten-egg gas in farts controls blood pressure in mice, a new study finds.
I wonder how the scientists determined the smell of mouse farts...

The unpleasant aroma of the gas, called hydrogen sulfide (H2S), can be a little too familiar, as it is expelled by bacteria living in the human colon and eventually makes its way, well, out.
A little too familiar, yup ask any wife ...

The new research found that cells lining mice's blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents' blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is "no doubt" produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.
No doubt just as relaxing to pass it as well... This sounds like one of those "win, win" situations

"Now that we know hydrogen sulfide's role in regulating blood pressure, it may be possible to design drug therapies that enhance its formation as an alternative to the current methods of treatment for hypertension," said Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., a co-author of the study detailed in the Oct. 24th issue of the journal Science.
More beans...

Snyder and his colleagues compared normal mice to mice that were missing a gene for an enzyme known as CSE, long suspected as being responsible for making hydrogen sulfide. As they measured hydrogen sulfide levels taken from tissues of the CSE-deficient mice, the scientists found that the gas was depleted in the cardiovascular systems of the altered mice. By contrast, normal mice had higher levels of the gas, thereby showing that hydrogen sulfide is naturally made by mammalian tissues using CSE.
So I guess thousands of men will now be telling their wives that far from being disgusting they are normal and healthy...

Next, the mice were subjected to higher blood pressures comparable to serious hypertension in humans. Scientists had them respond to a chemical called methacholine that relaxes normal blood vessels. The blood vessels of the CSE-lacking mice hardly relaxed, indicating that hydrogen sulfide is a huge contender for regulating blood pressure. So since I have high blood pressure and suffer no lack of hydogen sulfide, I guess that means...more beans! My poor wife and children. Please pray for them...

Hydrogen sulfide is the most recently discovered member of a family of gasotransmitters, small molecules inside our bodies with important physiological functions. Gasotransmitters...heh

This study is the first to reveal that the CSE enzyme that triggers hydrogen sulfide is activated itself in the same way as other enzymes when they trigger their respective gasotransmitter, such as a nitric oxide-forming enzyme that also regulates blood pressure, Dr. Snyder said.
Because gasotransmitters are common in mammals all over the evolutionary tree, these findings on the importance of hydrogen sulfide are thought to have broad applications to human diseases, such as diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases.

Maybe it's more related to politics than I thought..

The Gore Effect

The Gore Effect: The phenomenon that leads to unseasonably cold temperatures, driving rain, hail, or snow whenever Al Gore visits an area to discuss global warming. Priceless.
From The Reference Frame:
...In Cambridge, the warmest October 22nd occurred in 1979 when the temperature climbed to 83 °F. Well, it doesn't look like what they see today. Even the average high temperature for this day is 60 °F which is still far too high. After the noon, the temperature in Cambridge is 44.5 °F. Tonight, it is predicted to drop to 34 °F, close to the record low of 28 °F measured in 1940.
The forecast for Greater Boston from Sunday looked even more dramatic. Al Gore's speech was on Wednesday. Click the picture to see that on Sunday, they actually predicted snow for Wednesday. That didn't happen, after all, but nearby Vermont did receive its first snow this year today.For Thursday night (the day after ... the speech), the temperature in Cambridge is forecast to drop below the freezing point to 28 °F which, if true, will beat the record low temperature set in 1883, which means exactly 125 years ago, when it was 29 °F. Not bad! (Sorry, during Thursday, the prediction of 28 °F for tonight was raised to 31 °F; not quite a record but still below freezing.) (more here)

House Democrats Contemplate Abolishing 401(k) Tax Breaks

From WorkForce:
Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation’s $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive. (more)

Same-Sex Marriage Isn't Tolerant

From STR:

Just a few examples that demonstrate same-sex marriage isn't neutral. It's about normalization and approval as a federal judge ruled. Government can't be neutral when it's condones something in the law. And that has consequences for individuals.

• At my own children's high school there was a school-wide assembly to celebrate same-sex “marriage” in early December, 2003.
• Within months it was brought into the middle schools. In September, 2004, an 8th-grade teacher in Brookline, MA, told National Public Radio that the marriage ruling had opened up the floodgates for teaching homosexuality. “In my mind, I know that, `OK, this is legal now.' If somebody wants to challenge me, I'll say, `Give me a break. It's legal now,'” she told NPR.
• By the following year it was in elementary school curricula. Kindergartners were given picture books telling them that same-sex couples are just another kind of family, like their own parents.
• Second graders at the same school were read a book, “King and King”, about two men who have a romance and marry each other, with a picture of them kissing.
• A federal judge has ruled that the schools now have a duty to portray homosexual relationships as normal to children, despite what parents think or believe!
• A man undergoing a sex-change operation and cross-dressing was being brought into class to teach the children that there are now “different kinds of families.” (more)

Obama's False Medicare Claim

From FactCheck.org:

He accuses McCain of proposing to cut benefits. Not true.
Summary
In a TV ad and in speeches, Obama is making bogus claims that McCain plans to cut $880 billion from Medicare spending and to reduce benefits.
A TV spot says McCain's plan requires "cuts in benefits, eligibility or both."
Obama said in a speech that McCain plans "cuts" that would force seniors to "pay more for your drugs, receive fewer services, and get lower quality care."

Update, Oct. 21: A second Obama ad claims that McCain’s plan would bring about a 22 percent cut in benefits, “higher premiums and co-pays," and more expensive prescription drugs.

These claims are false, and based on a single newspaper report that says no such thing. McCain's policy director states unequivocally that no benefit cuts are envisioned. McCain does propose substantial "savings" through such means as cutting fraud, increased use of information technology in medicine and better handling of expensive chronic diseases. Obama himself proposes some of the same cost-saving measures. We're skeptical that either candidate can deliver the savings they promise, but that's no basis for Obama to accuse McCain of planning huge benefit cuts.

Couple Finds Unauthorized Charge on Credit Card from Obama Campaign

Voter fraud, fraudulent donations, crefit card fraud, denying relationships with terrorists, criminals, communists, radicals... Hmm, is there a pattern here? And keyed from Chicago...

KSDK -- At least four credit card holders in Missouri have recently opened their statements and found unauthorized transactions, which charged $2,300 to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.
It happened to Tom Brown and his wife a couple weeks ago. They became aware of it after Discover sent them an e-mail about an unusually large purchase.
"My wife said, 'Oh my God!' Right away, she called Discover to cancel the card," Brown said. "I talked to Discover about it, and they said it looks like it was keyed in from Chicago." (more)

The Joe-the-Plumber vote is bigger than you think

Keep the faith and vote like your contry depends on it. It just might..
From American Thinker:

Joe the Plumber did more than add some levity to the last presidential debate. Joe, aka Joe Wurzelbacher of Ohio, just may have awakened a swing bloc of voters that could make the difference in this election. This voting group can be described as "the rich" and those who aspire to be, and believe it or not, they could actually represent more than 20 percent of the electorate....

Basketball & A Political Metaphor

Political metaphor? Let's hope it plays out. Kumor and insight from CMR...

Media Bias and Biden's Bungles

From the NYPost:
...Biden is teling us that, at a time when Americans need to feel confidence in their government, they will be going "Oh my God." Not a great message.
Needless to say, if Sarah Palin said this about a McCain administration, the media world would be exploding.
Whether you believe Biden is exaggerating, as he is known to do, or is providing real insight, the double standard in the media does even more damage to their lagging brand.
Part of the problem is their "Obama love," but we're also seeing the media elite's belief - prejudice - that anyone with an R behind their name is dumb. So, if they say something dumb, they must be dumb. A Democrat, like Biden, can make wildly inaccurate or outrageous comments and they are ignored because the TV and press insiders feel they "know who he really is."
On the stump recently, Sen. Biden declared he had "three words" for what the nation needs: "J-O-B-S."
Lucky for him, his name isn't Dan Quayle, or that would have followed him for the rest of his career.

Obama and abortion: The truth lies in his record

From the St Louis Today Newspaper:
Among Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's many political talents is his ability to recalibrate his message to the tastes of different audiences. This gift for niche-messaging sometimes gets him into trouble — just ask those God-fearing, gun-clinging, small-town folks in Pennsylvania — but it also allows Obama to position himself as a candidate who transcends divisions despite a rigidly partisan record.Nowhere is Obama's skill at squaring contradictions more evident than on abortion. It is the rare presidential candidate who is adept enough at spinning his abortion record to win a historic endorsement from Planned Parenthood and earn a perfect voting score from NARAL Pro-Choice America, while also inspiring supporters to build websites proclaiming him the race's "pro-life" candidate. Those websites are run by Democratic partisans whose commitment to defending the right to life of the unborn generally ranks far behind their commitment to seeing the electoral map awash in blue. Still, their brashness in defending Obama's pro-life credentials is remarkable. Listening to them, you never would know that Obama supports taxpayer-funded abortions, opposed legislation aimed at protecting babies who survive late-term abortions and has pledged to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate virtually all federal, state and local restrictions on abortion.(more)

We don't care if it's a lie, just so long as it stirs up the conversation.'"

A chronicle of past voter fraud over at Spectator and how they've gotten better and more pervasive...

Extensive voter fraud has persisted to this day. Former Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky discusses in a recent Heritage Foundatioin report a shocking 1982 election for Governor in Illinois in which 10% of the votes cast in Chicago, 100,000 overall, were found to be fraudulent by a federal grand jury investigation that produced 63 criminal convictions for vote fraud. Spakovsky writes:
What particularly struck FBI agent Ernest Locker was how routine vote fraud was for the precinct captains, election judges, poll watchers, and political party workers he interviewed. They had been taught how to steal votes (and elections) by their predecessors, who had in turn been taught by their predecessors.
One primary method of perpetuating such fraud was for impersonators to vote in the name of dead people, people who had moved away, and fraudulently registered names. Impersonators were sometimes paid in cigarettes, liquor, or cash, known in the trade as "walking around money." Votes for a straight Democrat ticket, regardless of the actual voter's preferences, were also cast for the elderly, the disabled, and the sick who were unaware of what was going on. Then Chicago U.S. Attorney Dan Webb estimated that 80,000 illegal aliens were registered to vote in the city at the time, and that was 25 years ago.
Precinct captains filled out absentee ballots obtained by others, and absentee ballots with Republican votes were trashed. Another method was to alter the vote count by repeatedly running straight party line ballots through the counting machine, or altering the counting machine vote totals.

Pennsylvania Elections Boss Is ACORN Ally

According to American Spectator :

The man appointed by Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell to oversee the security and fairness of Pennsylvania elections has been discovered to be an ally of ACORN. Rendell, a Democrat, is a leading Obama supporter.

And oh look, now they've hooked up with MSNBC/NBC:

MSNBC has launched a news project with a variety of left-wing special interest groups to boost their Election Day coverage and help viewers experiencing problems at the polls.One of the groups involved in MSNBC's "Election Protection" project is the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. ACORN has been involved in rampant voter registration fraud across the nation this election cycle and is actively supporting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for president. (more here)

Boy, don't that just send a tingle down your leg...

"Obama needs ACORN, and we need Obama."

$31 million in taxpayer money and the deomocrats tried to put more in the first bail-out package.
From Investors Business Dailey:
That the greatest attempt at voter fraud in the nation's history is being funded in large part at taxpayer's expense is more than a bit ironic. House Minority Leader John Boehner wants it stopped and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wants the group allegedly behind the fraud, ACORN, criminally investigated and prosecuted.
ACORN calls itself a "nonpartisan" group seeking to register minorities and the poor. But its political arm has endorsed Barack Obama, who both trained the group's staff and sued the state of Illinois on their behalf. And Obama's campaign has given ACORN affiliates $800,000 for a get-out-the-vote drive.
In fact, it's a get-out-the-vote for Obama drive as evidenced by a video recently aired by Fox News that showed just how "nonpartisan" the group is. It was taken at ACORN's national convention where Rep. Maxine Waters spoke to a sea of ACORN organizers wearing their uniform of red baseball caps and shirts.
Waters, to great applause and cheers, said: "This has been the worst presidency that this country has ever known. But that's all right. We're getting rid of his (President Bush's) ass. He's got to go."
The next speaker, an ACORN representative defined who "we" meant. She said: "We're getting Obama for president! Obama needs us, ACORN, but we need Obama. Don't we? Yeah!" (more here)

On the Death of Journalism- An open letter to the local daily paper

From the Ornery American:
A letter we'd all like to write. A Eulogy for what's left of journalistic integrity.
Excerpt- read the whole thing here. The writer, Orson Scott Card is a science fiction writer, political writer and speaker/
...If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.
Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.
But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism

And what a surprise there is Ayers again...
From NRO:
It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy — and a whole lot of money — to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago. All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s. (more here)

So Called "Smears" About Obama Largely True

At least journalism still has some life in it over at Newsmax:
The Obama campaign says its candidate is a victim of “smears” — and has even created a Web site to fight such attacks.
But a Newsmax investigation finds many of the so-called smears are largely based in truth — and the Obama campaign uses half-truths, clever language, and ad hominem attacks to spin the facts.
Obama’s www.FightTheSmears.com focuses mainly on anti-Obama messages being repeated on the Internet and talk radio, the only media where Obama's ideological allies are not dominant.
These "smears" and the Obama rebuttals are often framed in lawyerly language that leaves much wiggle room in the candidate’s answers.
FightTheSmears.com also makes no attempt at objectivity, describing Obama’s critics as “pushing misleading research and distorted claims” because they are “ideologues” busy “spreading a ‘pack of lies’ about Barack.” ...

Here is an example:

...Claim No. 4: Obama has close ties with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a group suspected of massive voter registration fraud.
Obama’s site says the candidate was never an ACORN employee and that ACORN “was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive [Obama] ran in 1992.”
As Newsmax has documented in ["Clever Obama Tries To Bury ACORN Past,"]

Obama’s Web site is attempting to deceive when it says Obama was never “hired” to work as a trainer for ACORN’s leaders. In fact, he did the work for free from at least 1993 until 2003.

ACORN spokesman Lewis Goldberg acknowledges in the Oct. 11, 2008, New York Times that Obama trained ACORN leaders. And Obama worked as a lawyer for ACORN.

As to heading up Project Vote in Illinois, Obama said during a speech to ACORN leaders last November, "[When] I ran the Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack-dab in the middle of it.”

Veteran journalist Karen Tumulty described Project Vote in the Oct. 18, 2004, issue of Time magazine as “a nonpartisan arm of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now” after interviewing its national director.

The co-founder of ACORN, former Students for a Democratic Society official Wade Rathke, described Project Vote as one of ACORN’s “family of organizations.”

Over the years, ACORN and its front groups, like the one Obama ran in Illinois, have registered more than 4 million voters. When authorities in Virginia checked ACORN registrations, it found that 83 percent were fraudulent or had problems. This, in theory, could mean ACORN may have created the opportunity for stealing more than 3.3 million votes in this November’s election, a margin far wider than that by which Obama is likely to win. (more here)

Shock Poll: Dems Favor Obama

How the polls really work from over at Creative Minority Report: