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Today’s Tosser: I Love America Too

ArchPundit May 29, 2008 1 Comment

Atrios loves it and points out why and links to Sadly No!:

—– Original Message —–
From: Steve Gilbert
To: markkitchell@yahoo.com
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 6:14 AM
Subject: Any Record Of Charles W Payne?

Mr. Kitchell,

As you may have heard by now, Barack Obama has claimed that his great uncle Charlie Payne was a member of the 89th Div that liberated Buchenwald.

According to records his full name is either Charles W Payne or Charles T Payne (most likely the former), and he was born in 1924 — and he is still alive today.

He most likely was from Kansas at the time of enlistment.

Do you have any record of this gentleman?

Thank you,

Steve Gilbert
sweetness-light.com

PS – If you go to my website, you will see that I was probably the first to note the error in Mr. Obama’s first claims about his “uncle.”

Obama Claims His Uncle Liberated Auschwitz | Sweetness & Light
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/obama-claims-his-uncle-liberated-auschwitz

The reply was quick and to the point:

Please crawl back under the rock you came out from.

Good day

Raymond Kitchell, veteran 89th Inf Div

Not to leave it at that,

From: Mark Kitchell [mailto:markkitchell@yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 10:47 AM
To: Steve Gilbert
Subject: Re: Any Record Of Charles W Payne?

I don’t claim to represent anyone. You are the one who came to my son and I asking for information.

Please spend ample time chasing down the lies fed to you by chickenhawks Bush & Co. Like 90% of this administration, they don’t have the foggiest idea what we went through or what we saw at Ohrdruf.

I wonder how many people who visit the 89th Infantry site and support Mr. Kitchell’s work realize his politics are those of Cindy Sheehan?

Kitchell helped liberate Ohrdruf, but he hates America.  Obviously.  And because some genealogy sites have a different middle initial, Obama must be lying and there must be a witch hunt.  Our discourse can get lower after all. 

As I Get Into Cycling Season with the Giro

ArchPundit May 29, 2008 No Comments

Trust but Verify is still doing bang up work on the mess created by the incompetence of WADA and UCI in regards to the Floyd Landis case.  Landis is set to learn the result of his final appeal in June.  The problem with the case, as I’ve long maintained, is that the lab work was so shoddy that one is unable to determine if Landis doped.  This is the worst possible outcome because one cannot clear Landis and one cannot condemn Landis leaving no sense of justice or finality. 

My guess is that the appeal will be denied given the bias against athletes in the process, but that only creates a terribly unsatisfying result for fans. 

And worse, Dick Pound no longer heads WADA and that was a fine name to make fun of–and he was a huge incompetent ass so I didn’t feel guilty. 

Daily Dolt: The Paisley Islamist

ArchPundit May 29, 2008 1 Comment

Our discourse may have hit rock bottom. 

I may just go all sports today

ArchPundit May 29, 2008 1 Comment

Awesome Outdoor Hockey in Wrigley. 

Bring Out the Blood Pressure Medication

ArchPundit May 29, 2008 No Comments

Or Back to the Future.

Doug Collins is coming back.

As he spent his college career at Illinois State I grew up hearing about him and then watched him freak out repeatedly as Bulls Coach I can confidently say even if the Bulls suck, he’ll be worth tuning in to watch.

We Are All Gonna Die!

ArchPundit May 12, 2008 No Comments

And the parallels between Bush and Blagojevich continue:

“This is an emergency,” Blagojevich told reporters after the announcement. “Children are being shot and killed. And for lawmakers to say we can’t do it, that’s exactly the reason why there’s so much violence out there today and so we’re just not gonna take ‘no’ for an answer.”

No lawmakers had yet said that they couldn’t do what the governor wanted. Blagojevich briefed just a couple of them beforehand, so how would he even know how lawmakers felt? The governor hadn’t submitted legislation containing the proposal, so lawmakers hadn’t even seen it. Heck, they probably hadn’t even seen the press release at that point.

What he meant was that he would make the choice very clear to the General Assembly: “If you don’t vote for my capital plan, then you’re siding with the killers.”

As if the Statehouse atmosphere wasn’t poisoned enough with broken promises, stalled legislation, rising deficits, corruption allegations (most of them against the governor himself) and general dysfunction, now we’re going to be subjected to crud like this?

Fear-mongering doesn’t work forever. Bush’s use of the tactic isn’t producing the results it once did, partly because we’ve become almost dulled to the overuse of fear and partly because he’s been so discredited in the public’s eyes.

Blagojevich is even more discredited than Bush, if the polls are correct, so it’s doubtful that this gambit will work to persuade a skeptical General Assembly and an angry public to climb aboard. Just the opposite.

And that’s too bad because his plan is pretty good.

Many of Blagojevich’s plans are decent or at least a good place to start negotiating. The problem is that he doesn’t negotiate in good faith and he thinks any criticism is an attack on him and not a policy disagreement.  And those who disagree must be demonized.

The most bizarre thing from this proposal is that he insists it must be passed immediately, but then ties it to the Titanic of bills currently.  Blagojevich, like Bush, is quickly becoming background noise. If he loses Jones, he’ll simply be a bystandard.

The Question is Seldom Asked; Is Our Children Learning

ArchPundit May 9, 2008 No Comments

Despite the desperate claims of Big Tent Democrat, the polling shows virtually no difference between Obama and Clinton against McCain in regard to white voters who are lower income, there isn’t any evidence that there is a problem for Obama any more than there is for Clinton.

From the Diago/Hotline poll:

White Voters

McCain 51%

Clinton  40 %

McCain 51%
Obama 38 %

Under $30,000 year voters

McCain: 37 %

Obama 50 %

McCain 37 %

Clinton 55 %

Women
McCain  37 %

Obama  51 %

McCain 37 %

Cllinton 52 %

So the only real difference is Obama does slightly worse with those under $30,000 in a general election match-up, but then actually does slightly better than Clinton in the 30-50 K bracket.

The reality based community understands several things that BTD doesn’t:

1.    Demographic blocs in primaries don’t translate into demographic blocs in general elections
2. The people who actually vote in Democratic primaries overwhelmingly vote Democratic in the general election
3. Obama does just as well in most categories in a general election match ups and better in other categories to the point that as of right now, there is very little difference in general election match-ups. Overall, the differences amongst these groups in a general election match up is very small so the notion that this is a great weakness for Obama is a simply a fiction.
4. Just as Clinton would have to shore up some voters, Obama needs to shore up some voters, but the polling to date indicates only small differences based on gender, income, and race.

Trying to portray preferences in the primary as evidence for a weakness in the general when general election polls show little difference indicates there is someone with a problem with reality, it’s just not who BTD thinks it is.

I Must Be in the Front Row

ArchPundit May 5, 2008 No Comments

So I am on the Steve Earle e-mail list and got a notice that pre-sale was going on for Saint Louis a while ago.  Didn’t think much of it other than I wanted to go so I bought two tickets.  They ended up being front row center. It was a fantastic show.  Here’s a clip from earlier in the tour:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/5PJC_9apec0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Busy on Tuesday, but we’ll see.

Dude, When the Constitution Party Won’t Take You

ArchPundit April 29, 2008 No Comments

Alan Keyes beat out for the Constitution Party nomination for President:

The Permanent Candidate has failed to win the nomination of the paleoconservative Constitution Party. Eric Garris reports:

Last night, CP founder Howard Phillips strongly denounced [Alan] Keyes as a warmonger, neocon, and egomaniac. Phillips was subsequently attacked by Jim Clymer, the CP national chairman.

In spite of Keyes bringing in a lot of delegates, the CP remained true to their anti-interventionist views and rejected Keyes.

The nomination instead went to the antiwar conservative Chuck Baldwin, by a vote of 383.8 to 125.7. It’s a small but satisfying victory for two noble though possibly lost causes: the movement to end the occupation of Iraq and the transideological coalition to get Alan Keyes to shut up.

I pointed out a while back that the California affiliate of the Constitution Party is the old American Independent Party, a group formed as a political vehicle for the segregationist George Wallace. Jim Antle of The American Spectator, who has done the best reporting I’ve seen on the CP race, tells me that the California delegation backed Keyes, a black man — while the party’s two black state chairs were Keyes’ leading opponents. It’s a complicated world, innit?

When Illinois Review and I agree, it’s truly transideological.

My Memories of Harold Washington

ArchPundit April 29, 2008 No Comments

Growing up in central Illinois Chicago was always the boogeyman of Illinois politics where the Machine ran everything and ‘the blacks’ were dangerous.  Democrats were inherently bad so the entire spectacle was interesting to watch.

However, I also spent my summers in Covington, Georgia where my Dad lived.  Covington’s main claim to fame  was being the setting for the first episodes of the Dukes of Hazzard.  Race in semi-rural Georgia was a lot different than race in Central Illinois.  It’s hard to imagine two cultures more different within the United States, but a small town in Georgia 10-15 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was far different from Bloomington Normal even as conservative as the towns were.  Molly Ivins said of being a southern liberal:

“Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything,”

After spending about 7 summers prior to 1983 (about the time my Dad moved further south to essentially a northern culture in Florida), watching the 1983 Chicago Mayor’s race on television opened my eyes to many things I’d never seen before.  People said they believed in Civil Rights in Bloomington Normal (after all we were only down the highway from Everett Dirksen’s home district), but a black man as Mayor of Chicago terrified them even as they were three hours a way.  I was always assured when I’d talk about Georgia and how African-Americans were treated that we were different, after all, Lincoln was from Central Illinois and much of the beginnings of the Republican Party were in the area and it had been strongly in favor of abolition.

But the reaction to Harold made woke me up to the reality that African Americans didn’t receive the same treatment in Chicago or in Central Illinois, we just hid it better.  African-Americans in Central Illinois didn’t live in the shacks I’d saw in Covington and would never see people living in again until visiting Nicaragua.  I didn’t see the abject poverty in Central Illinois. I didn’t see swimming pools that were effectively segregated by social pressure.

But I did hear the fear and anger in the voices of those people when Harold won.  To them, Chicago would be destroyed and the riots of 1968 would return.  Bernard Epton’s “before it’s too late” captured their attitude perfectly. (I’d mention my grandmother here, but apparently that would be throwing her under the bus)

As Molly Ivins said, once I figured they were lying about race, I started to question everything.  Harold wasn’t just some random black man though who showed revealed the deep seated bigotry.  He was a genuinely likable guy who was not angry at what he faced.  He was a guy who could laugh and reach out no matter how much whites rebuffed him.  When you heard Jesse Jackson or Gus Savage, they seemed angry–and often with reason, but it was hard to relate if  you did not understand where they were coming from.  Harold was different using humor to disarm race and then speak quite plainly to an audience without changing what he said to different audiences.

Harold Washington died before I was even old enough to vote and I never lived in his city while he was Mayor.  That said, I learned more about the people around me because of him and he has always been one of my political heroes. He was a very flawed man as well, but the thing we have forgotten since his time is that perfection often comes at the expense of experience.