Update: Many thanks to Ace and Hot Air for the links. And don’t miss Ace taking me all the way back to square one and reminding me that in the first set of remarks, Obama didn’t say a damn thing about family; he said “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and then tried to spin it into meaning dependence on family and the community (“community,” lest we forget, one of the nauseatingly repeated trend words of the left) … and it still comes out as a bad thing in his lexicon. Because it’s what he really thinks. Well done, Barack. But it’s all part and parcel of the new left idea that only the family you choose for yourself matters … thus it’s honorable and decent for Barack to stand by the pastor whose rhetoric is abhorred by so many millions of voters, but “cling” to your family? That’s only because you’re in distress and oh yeah, it’s also raaaaaaaaaacist.

There are two main things that allow you to get along with other people in life: Making sure that what you say and do publicly are acceptable to enough people and making sure that how you really believe and act are acceptable to people important to you. Obama just let voters know how he really believes.

***

Keep digging, Barack. Dig yourself all the way to China, where they already have communism, and see how you like it, jackass.

Original remarks:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Got that? You can’t be frustrated about illegal immigration or anything else that matters to your ideas about how this country should operate or who should have to obey the law, really, you know you can’t. You’re just pissed that a factory shut down and took your job away so you have to have some outlet for that anger. Whereas (presumably) if you vote for Barry he’ll have your factory job back in a heartbeat so that you never have to consider moving, consider going where times are more prosperous, consider how you might alter your life to adapt to changing circumstances, changes that might actually end up being for the better.

Spin in Indiana Friday night, insulting the intelligence of my fellow Hoosiers, though judging by the applause, those present were begging to have it insulted:

They don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s gonna help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns … issues like gay marriage … take refuge in their faith and their community and families, things they can count on … so here’s what’s rich. Senator Clinton says, “Well, I don’t think people are bitter in Pennsylvania …” John McCain says, “Oh, how can he say that? How can he say people are bitter?”

No, jackass, “bitter” was not the damning epithet. I’m pretty disgusted and bitter my own self at having to choose between an open-borders guy and a couple of socialists, one with racism thrown in for good measure. Saying people only care about religion, the right to bear arms, their families and communities (code, by the way, for they embrace only their own and despise, perhaps even violently, all other comers, out of this same bitterness), that was the damning bit. And sensible people in Indiana and elsewhere are hearing it, reading it, and knowing it. Keep digging.

Spin in Indiana Saturday morning:

I said somethin’ that everybody knows is true … people don’t feel like they’re being listened to. So they pray, and they count on each other, and they count on their families … you know this in your own life. And what we need is a government that is actually paying attention … fighting for workin’ people, [blah blah blah blah socialist code words up to and including American Dream].”

Once again, you’re not supposed to count on your family or your faith, you’re supposed to count on your government. He simply cannot fathom the concept that people do not believe this is the proper role of government, that nobody in their right mind wants to count on government for their needs and wants. So he says “I could have said it better,” but then goes on to say the same damn thing in the same damn way because he simply cannot believe it couldn’t be the truth.

This is the real Barack Obama, believe it. People counting on their families and God is not appropriate; these things are merely the refuge of the bitter. This is why his chosen church and his mentor/married-him/baptized-his-kids pastor are not about God but about race and class–because that’s all he believes in. People don’t vote their class identity not because they don’t believe this is an appropriate basis for choosing a government, because they believe individual rights are a better foundation, but merely because they’re embittered and don’t believe voting on class would change the class structure. There is nothing in his world but class structure and how he can alter it so that we’re all supposedly on the same basis, which in his mind means lack of inequity but in reality will result in nothing but lack of opportunity, lack of will, lack of ambition, lack of work, lack of achievement.

Keep digging, Barry. Hey, maybe there’s a silver lining: If you need to count on God and your family if your government doesn’t make your life turn out the way you want it to, then perhaps we’ll have a lot of converts to Christianity and family trust after you pull down the life edifaces of America’s wealthy.

And PS–if all the people you talk to are “bitter,” did it ever occur to you that these might be the only ones (not all of the populace or, it is to be hoped, even a majority) who want the government to put a bandaid on them and make it better, who might think it’s a swell idea to whine to a politician about how bad they have it (really, often, not that bad at all)? Seek out some ordinary folks without an axe to grind and then see how well your vision holds up.

My dear Fug Girl, what are you thinking about? Kelly Preston’s dress here is not a scroll-down fug. It is not an “ostensibly lovely” dress. It is made of gray jersey knit. I hesitate to point this out, as I freely admit it could be my eyes at fault and not yours, but it sure looks like she picked up a jersey-knit sheet, wrapped it around her bare, and down the road she go. It explains the peculiar drape and the willingness of the fabric to cling to her tights and make those fugly wrinkles-under-the-drapiness. Look again, sweet Jessica, for the full effect of the fug.

Star Destroyers built from scratch. Wow. Link goes to a 48″ model, but be sure to check out the first of two 24-incher as well, not to mention the 2-cm Falcon that goes with it.

H/t J.

Come on, Air Force, do better than this. SAC deserves better. Hell, for that matter, so does Cyber Command, whatever that is.

Update: If you’re wondering why I care, besides the fact that it’s slipshod, lazy, and rude, my dad was SAC (Strategic Air Command–bombers, tankers, and a few other arms) during his 20-year tour as an air force pilot. “Peace is Our Profession” was SAC’s motto. My dad and his KC-135 and B-52 buddies finished it “…Nuclear War is Just a Hobby.”

Update x2: “…so does Cyber Command, whatever that is.” See? I knew I liked John Noonan. Sounds to me like some people are too busy worrying about their patch, too cheap to pay a designer to make them a non-plagiarized one, and have their priorities a bit out of wack.

Death penalty.

Some of the Obama crowd sees Diversity in Action:

While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama’s event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama. The Tartan’s correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, “Get me more white people, we need more white people.” To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, “We’re moving you, sorry. It’s going to look so pretty, though.”

“I didn’t know they would say, ‘We need a white person here,’ ” said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. “I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn’t know it would be so outright.”

H/t Hot Air headlines.

Okay, there’s one tiny part of it I may have a right to complain about, but it doesn’t come until the end.

My dad was a pilot at a regional airline, feeder to a major airline, which was eventually bought by the major airline. He’s retired now, but he and his immediate family retain flight privileges. He and my mother fly free; my sisters and I fly for a certain amount per mile (I don’t know what it is; their computers just calculate what it costs us to fly from point A to point B and it’s always the same for any given points A and B). In addition, we can buy a limited number of “Buddy Passes” at similar prices, though slightly higher, for anyone we like to travel with us.

Two catches: The travel is standby, and priority (the part where we sit at the gate with pale faces and shallow breathing while the agents calculate how many standbys they can put on board and which ones it will be) is determined by hiring date of the employee or former employee (my dad). So somebody whose dad or husband was hired before my dad gets to get on the plane before me, and if there’s any seat left after that I’ll get my chance. But–wrinkle!–Buddy Passes are always of lower priority than the family of the employee. So if I travel with my son, he’s on a Buddy Pass, and he comes after everybody else who is family of an employee, no matter whether they were hired before my father or not. And because he can’t travel without me, I’m bumped down to his priority level. Translation: We are always last or close to it.

Since 9/11, as you can imagine, with drastically reduced routes and correspondingly more packed airplanes, standby travel has been such a nightmare that I’ve largely forgone it altogether, especially with the Bean in tow. Traveling back to the Midwest for this death in Daddyman’s family, we bought one-way tickets, not knowing when the service would be, etc. Mistake. At the very least, son and I should have bought round trips. I decided I could “just fly standby” to get back out, even though I haven’t done this with son for years. Mistake. I’ve been watching the seat numbers get lower … lower … and lower until they’re finally overbooked, while son sits at the bottom of the priority list with Buddy Pass beside his name. Once they’re overbooked, it’s no use to go to the airport, so we stay another day and start the process over again. It’s painful, to say the least.

As I said, I have no right to complain. It’s a privilege to fly cheap, or would be if we could ever do it at all, one that the airline has no obligation to offer us (and a lot of the gate agents for some reason never want to let us forget that, even though their own friends and family travel the same way and presumably are subjected to degrading treatment from their fellow agents). It’s just painful, upsetting, and leaves us with an unpalatable choice of paying hundreds of dollars for a one-way flight or sitting on our butts for a few more days until we can snag a flight that isn’t overbooked and has few enough standbys that my son’s priority will see us through.

But here’s the thing, the one thing I do have some right to complain about. Airlines are running as lean as they can in routes and equipment use because of all the factors you and I both know all about–9/11, heightened security, rising gas prices. So the flights are always full. But worse: I know you know the phrase code share. This is when airlines say it’s their flight but it’s actually on an entirely different airline altogether. So they find it very easy to judge how many flights they should put on a certain route–how many passengers are they having to pawn off on their bretheren airlines? And if it’s not enough to fill a second airplane, why would they put a second flight on the route? Makes perfect economic sense.

But I don’t understand how this is not an illegal monopoly. They are colluding with their fellow airlines to determine capacity, and therefore supply, and therefore price. If the major airline in question only has to pawn off ten revenue passengers per route to their code share partners (oh, how I hate the very phrase), they don’t have to bother trying to market extra flights with attractive prices. And therefore they cram every flight to bursting (literally; overbooking is another practice I despise) and our privileges completely evaporate.

And they are privileges; if they’re gone, well, too bad. But it angers me that they’re gone through what appears from the outside to be a monopolistic business practice that should be illegal under antitrust laws. If anybody can explain that to me, let me hear from you.

I’ve known about this for a while and then read about it at Anne’s and still didn’t post about it, but it really is a ridiculous outrage on top of all the other indignities of airline travel: Only one checked bag per customer or you’ll pay for it, literally. The chart, from the Wall Street Journal, lists the one-bag-only offenders as United and U.S. Airways. Even worse but a little more understandable, a newer discount carrier, Skybus, offers no free baggage–but if that’s been their policy since the beginning and part of the reason why they can offer rock-bottom prices on their as-yet very few routes, that passes the laugh test. But when you’re two of the biggest carriers in the country and charging prices to match, changing the decades-old policy of allowing the baggage to come with the customer seems like economically shooting yourself in the foot. My son travels with a checked suitcase and a checked carseat, and I don’t see that changing any time soon, so United and U.S. Air, kindly shove your money-hoovering policy right up your pitot tube.

But the mistakes can be hard–rock-hard. Or diamond-hard, as in baseball. [Link changed in October when original link broke.] The Cubs can’t do anything right even on their statuary.

Before the [Ernie] Banks statue went on display at Wrigley Monday, many people had inspected it, and they agreed: Mr. Cub, 7 feet and 300 pounds of bat-swinging bronze, looked great.

Cella, who works at the Fine Art Studio of Rotblatt-Amrany in Highwood, had scrutinized the things that mattered most to him as the sculptor.

How was the patina? Excellent. Was the inscription on the correct side of the granite base? Yes, it was. Right down there on Ernie’s left it said:

LETS PLAY TWO.

Groan.

Katelyn Thrall, a Cubs representative, walked in, brusquely stuck out her hand and didn’t wait for me to explain.

“We’re going to fix it,” she said. “That’s all I can say.”

Fabulous. Will you also fix Harry Caray’s while you’re at it? You can just take his apostrophe off and give it to Banks.

H/t Banks article: J. I saw the Caray myself lo those years ago, last time I was at Wrigley.

Update: That was quick. You can tell there was no space for it to begin with, but we’ll take what we can get, which apparently does not include anybody noticing, commenting on, or fixing Harry Caray’s. H/t J again.

The crazy isn’t just coming out of the wife:

It’s also time to amend our bankruptcy laws so families aren’t forced to stick to the terms of a home loan that was predatory or unfair.

Also sprach Obamessiah. The culture of stupidity and irresponsibility will march on proudly under Obama’s banner–why bother to read the terms of your loan and decide for yourself if you can stick them or not? Under The Obama Nursery, you won’t have to!

The infuriating hypocrisy of people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year firstly making noises to the effect that they don’t have enough money or, more believably, don’t manage it so that they save enough, and then soothing the herd–“there there, there there”–with promises that they won’t have to try, won’t have to save their money or manage it, won’t have to pay attention to the way they run their lives because the government will bail them out with the money of those who do is beyond reproach–it’s all the way to “outcry,” but it remains to be seen how much of one there will be before this clown is actually elected, since apparently there’s not going to be enough to deny him his deluded party’s nomination.

Allah wants to know how Obama defines victory. However he might define it, he’s not going to get it by keeping “a strike force” somewhere “in the region.” How is a strike force not an occupation? And if it is an occupation, how could he justify keeping it somewhere else, any more than he can in Iraq? But that’s beside the point that Obama and others of his ilk will always refuse to define victory, because the word presupposes a cause of action, one that might even be justified and whose success might be desirable. And that would wreck the whole foundation of their platform. Listen in vain–Obama will never say what would have defined success in Iraq because that presupposes a justification to be there, even while he proposes keeping an undefined body of troops in an undefined location to perform semi-defined tasks to a level of undefined success–because to define that success would imply that the other side has a perfectly good operating definition of their own.

Update: See?

McCain has not specified the number of troops he will keep in Iraq or the length of time they will be kept there. Obama has willfully distorted this position and implied that McCain wants to keep U.S. forces enmeshed in a century long war in Iraq. Fine. Distorting the other guys position is part of the game–or at least that’s how the “old politics” worked. But Obama can’t have it both ways. His Iraq plan also involves keeping an unspecified number of troops in Iraq for an unspecified length of time. The difference? McCain’s objective is victory. Obama’s objective, like the details of his strike force, remains unspecified.

I like poetry, but I don’t take the initiative often enough to sit down and read some, cold, so to speak. It’s not good reading-during-dinner material. But many times I’ve come to love and internalize poetry through singing it–either something I sang in one of the choirs I’ve been a member of or, in this case, CDs I really like. Choral music introduced me to the work of Christina Rosetti, for example, and this Nickel Creek rendering of “Sweet Afton” by Robert Burns is everything you could want in a lullaby. If you’ve never heard it, do yourself a favor and give it a listen–the video’s embedding code was “disabled by request,” alas, so I have to link it. Listen to words like “yon” and “rills” and “stem” roll out as though they’re perfectly understandable modern English alongside venerable rocks of the language like “lofty.” I particularly like the phrase “far marked.” I’ve sung this to my son for a long time now, and I haven’t decided if Burns’s “Mary” is really “asleep by thy murmuring stream” or dead, her death made palatable by poetic license.

That’s not true; I have decided. She’s only asleep. And if you know of Burns commentary that says otherwise, don’t tell me.

My son’s paternal grandfather has passed away. We’ll all be away coping with that for a while. Be well.