Michael Ramirez cartoon for Jan. 20, 2009 at Investor's Business Daily

Obama’s in and he’s all about change and…copying Bush? John Hinderaker at Power Line blog notes that President Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, along with his national security appointments, smacks of predecessor W. and notes that even comedians are commenting on the similarities. It doesn’t speak well of liberals, he writes, that they actually seem to be hoping that he’s lying, that his actions will somehow contradict all the rhetoric. Below, even Jon Stewart of The Daily Show jabs at the incoming president through an eerie montage of speech snippets comparing the two presidents, though the left-leaning TV news-satire host waxes apologetic.

Clinton did, Kennedy didn’t, and Geithner shouldn’t. Hillary Clinton is the new Secretary of State, but a once-favored candidate to replace her as a Senator from New York, Caroline Kennedy, has bowed out. Jim Geraghty argues for National Review Online that her withdrawal is a good thing, and that the whole case in her favor seemed built upon her royal blood. Meanwhile, for the same outlet, Byron York tears into Timothy Geithner, Obama’s pick for treasury secretary whose confirmation has been stalled somewhat ironically over a failure to properly file and pay taxes, because the man wouldn’t ‘fess up in the Senate hearing. Regardless, York predicts Geithner will prevail because his Democratic allies, who lead the Finance Committee, are rushing the vote.

Obama spells setbacks for the pro-life movement. The new President has said he would sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act if it lands on his desk, and some analysts suggest the latest iterations of the bill would roll back many of the pro-life movement’s hard-fought gains—forty states restricting late-term abortions for instance. Michael J. New, writing for NRO suggests conservatives have been in this position before, under the Clinton Administration, and that the movement to ban or restrict abortions wasn’t stamped out then, so there is cause for hope. G. Tracy Mehan, III takes a slightly more practical view for The American Spectator: Obama would be well-advised not to risk losing his immense political capital when his main task is to deal with the economy.

Don’t you get it? Hamas doesn’t just want a separate Palestine, but wants the annihilation of Israel, writes former New York Times foreign correspondent Clifford D. May for NRO. Israel likely timed its recent attack on Gaza, where Hamas fighters have been in control since last year, to beat the inauguration of Barack Obama, May argues. That’s because Obama likely would have made ending the battle one of his top priorities. But Israel had to fight, May argues, and the war is far from over—just to keep things in perspective.

If Obama brings back Carterism, it won’t be good. Many commentators have compared President Obama’s foreign policy prescription to that of former President Jimmy Carter. Arthur Herman lays out a thorough explanation in Commentary magazine of how and why Carter’s policies didn’t work nearly as well as Reagan’s, Clinton’s, or even W’s. Then he worries in writing that Obama’s pledge for “aggressive diplomacy” is meaningless and that this new Carterism almost belittles America’s record for tough peacekeeping. Are we shying away from rather than donning our mantle as leader of the free world?

“I hope he fails,” Rush Limbaugh says of Obama, but don’t take it out of context. The conservative talk show host defended his statement here, noting that he would be proud to earn the headline “Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails” from the “Drive-By Media.” But it’s about liberal economic policies that have failed and will continue to fail, he notes, and haven’t the liberals, after all, been out to secure the failure of Bush’s policies? R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. over at The American Spectator, comes to his defense after multiple stories (and even a senator) have focused on the sensationalism of the comment rather than the content of the argument.

Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor's Business Daily for Jan. 12, 2009

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may seem old news, but it’s entering a new phase, argues Jonathan Schanzer, deputy executive director of the Jewish Policy Center. Mark Hemingway of National Review Online discusses Schanzer’s new book, Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine, and relays Schanzer’s argument that the mainstream media have oversimplified the conflict by underestimating the internal divisions in Palestine. After all, Fatah and Hamas aren’t allies. Israel’s current struggle is with Gaza alone.

President George W. Bush held his final press conference yesterday morning. Fox News commentators and guests offer analysis.

And here Bush gets a little more personal with Fox’s Brit Hume. The president explains why he is so calm and content as he prepares to leave office, and tells Hume that he’s even planning to write a book that will explain and defend some of the most controversial decisions he made while in office.

Is it a new New Deal or not, and does it even matter? President-elect Barack Obama’s record-smashing stimulus plan will likely top $1 trillion when it’s finally approved. Jonah Goldberg writes over at NRO’s The Corner blog that only liberals are comparing this strategy with FDR’s New Deal and adds that conservatives feel the comparison is moot. But Pat Buchanan would apparently disagree. In an editorial for Investor’s Business Daily, Buchanan argues not only that Obama seems to be channeling Roosevelt, but that massive spending is more likely to get us into trouble than to bail us out of it. In a separate IBD editorial, Lawrence Kudlow sees a more conservative tinge to Obama’s plan, drawing a parallel to Reagan’s tax-cut plan. Big government, limited government, or something in between? Obama keeps us guessing.

Google searches are speeding climate change (but then, isn’t everybody?). A physicist is trying to publish his findings on the amount of energy consumed by Google’s data centers every time you try to run a search (the energy used boiling water for a cup of tea equals two searches). William Teach responds sarcastically at Right Wing News, suggesting that the global warming “Believers” log off and stop using the Internet. Teach writes that he did 15 Google searches after reading the article, just for fun.

Eco-warriors: stop procreating, humans hurt the planet. Feminists: stop procreating, it’s sexist. Cassy Fiano writes on her blog and on Right Wing News that the newest argument in favor of the extinction of mankind is that sexual reproduction is a sexist, culturally oppressive holdover from a less civilized time, more or less. She goes on to excoriate modern feminism as it drifts toward something like Stalinism. But hey, sex without reproduction would be really fun for about, say, one generation.

Always a rebel, Mickey Rourke’s Hollywood comeback doesn’t preclude careless comments—you know, supporting Bush. It’s unpopular in Hollywood to defend the outgoing president, writes Andrew Breitbart of Big Hollywood, but having just won the best actor Golden Globe award for his performance in The Wrestler, Rourke did just that. Bush was simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Rourke said, and the situation after 9/11 would have been near impossible for any conceivable leader. Breitbart suggests that Rourke’s peer-slash-rival Sean Penn had a much inferior and less ballsy dalliance into politics when he publicly supported Fidel Castro’s regime, and writes that any “no friend of Sean Penn is a friend of mine.”

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer sued Santa and won. Check out the parody column at the Globe and Mail. It’s a cautionary tale about discrimination, or rather a roast on political correctness…

Feliz ‘dinejad! says National Review Online’s Mark Steyn. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave the “alternative Christmas message” on BBC 4 this year. Here’s the story and the full text of Ahmadinejad’s message, and here’s the response from NRO’s Michael Rubin.

We’re safer since 9/11 because of the policies of the Bush Administration, writes Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in a Washington Times op-ed. John Hinderaker at Power Line agrees, but places less emphasis on airport and border security and more on Bush’s aggressiveness overseas. Hinderaker adds that he hopes the Obama Administration realizes we need to stay aggressive. But how the president-elect will lead is still a big question mark.

Huffington’s read on the economic crisis is wrong, argues David Harsanyi at RealClearPolitics. In a recent post on the same site, Arianna Huffington wrote that laissez-faire capitalism is dead, but Harsanyi rebuts, pointing out that federal regulation has actually grown during the Bush years. Harsanyi decries leftist scare tactics and argues we shouldn’t use a temporary recession to make foundational changes to the economy.

Obama shouldn’t go after the Bush Administration for war crimes, writes Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call. With “Bush haters” calling for investigations into war crimes related to the global war on terror, “Obama should make it clear right now that he opposes such action,” Kondracke writes. Such calls are a sign of “political vengeance” rather than truth-seeking, and a probe would disrupt national unity and, more importantly, morale within the intelligence community during wartime. Putting a stop to such talk now, Obama would also prevent the “unseemly” possibility that Bush blanket pardons everyone involved in the GWOT on his way out.

Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor's Business Daily - 12/16/08

Dennis Miller rips into Barack Obama over the Chicago corruption scandal. Talk show host Bill O’Reilly tries to play it neutral, but Miller takes the President-elect to task for being either oblivious or disingenuous. Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin at National Review assesses just how involved disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s wife was in all the backdoor shenanigans, in her piece The Real Housewives of Crook County.

Newsweek’s cover story “hero” isn’t much of a hero, writes Scott Johnson at Powerlines blog. The Newsweek story puts a positive spin on Thomas Tamm, the whistle blower who played a prominent role in tipping off the New York Times to a Pulitzer-Prize winning story about the government’s secret wiretapping of Americans and others living inside the borders. Apparently, the government has hounded Tamm ever since, but Johnson suggests both Tamm and the Times could be liable to criminal prosecution for breaking espionage laws.

America must protect us from Muslim fanatics (and shoe attacks). After an Iraqi journalist threw both of his shoes at President Bush at a press conference, a sign of serious disrespect in the Muslim world (no kidding), conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly insists we need tough but smart policies to protect Americans.

Better not make hasty decisions in an economic crisis, writes Jonah Goldberg at National Review. We’ve learned a lot from past mistakes and we shouldn’t make them again. He’s referring to the Fed tightening the money supply.

Ann Coulter defends her reference to the President-elect as B. Hussein Obama, taking on Alan Colmes and Pat Caddell. The squabbling began when Obama announced he would use his middle name for the Inauguration.

Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor's Business Daily, Dec. 4

Democrats value politics more than the success of the U.S. auto industry, argue the editors at National Review. The deal is more about preserving union jobs and subsidizing hybrid vehicles, and stipulations such as the one that prevents automakers from seeking injunctions against states like California, which has stricter emissions standards than the national average, will make it difficult for the industry to survive. Automakers argue that, after all, they can’t afford to make different cars for different states.

The Blagojevich corruption scandal marks just one of many for Democrats this year, writes Michelle Malkin at National Review. Now it’s Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was arrested on suspicion of numerous counts of pay-to-play deals, including one that would have sold President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But this year other Dems were caught in the act: Democratic Representatives William Jefferson and Charlie Rangel, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and Massachusetts State Senator Diane Wilkerson, to name a few. The important question for right wing radio personality Hugh Hewitt: how far Obama will be willing to let U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald pursue the Illinois corruption case.

Newsweek’s political agenda is showing, and it’s all rainbow-y. Married writers Mark and Mollie Hemingway tag team the weekly publication, where the cover story makes the “religious case for gay marriage.” Both Hemingways bash the Lisa Miller article for getting the Scripture wrong, and Mr. Hemingway points out that the editor’s response to the backlash further demonstrates the magazine’s decision to take a solid political stance.

Obama’s speechwriter would have lost his career if he were Republican, argues Andrew Breitbart at The Washington Times. The image above, which was posted briefly on Facebook, shows 27-year-old Jon Favreau and a buddy groping a cardboard cutout of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Dee Dee Myers, who worked for the sex-scandal-stained Clinton administration, expressed outrage at the denigration and humiliation of women, though Ed Morrissey at Hot Air downplayed the whole incident as a joke.

Michael Ramirez cartoon for December 2, 2008 at Investor's Business Daily.

Barack Obama may have flip-flopped on Hillary’s foreign policy experience, but that’s small potatoes. Allahpundit, in a post at Hot Air, writes that lying is to be expected from the President-elect, but the more important issue is that he has made ambassador to the U.N. a Cabinet-level position, signaling to Hillary Clinton that she can be replaced, and that Obama means business when he says he wants soft diplomacy to play a bigger role in his administration.

Advice to Obama: don’t repeat the mistakes of Hoover and Roosevelt. Investor’s Business Daily points out this economic downturn is serious but by no means as severe as the Depression, but warns that we still ought to heed past lessons. In a nutshell: support free trade, cut taxes across the board, don’t rely on big government projects as economic stimuli, and support the Fed as it cuts rates.

Piracy is one of those unconventional threats Washington worries about: so get ‘em where it hurts. Seth Cropsey argues on The Weekly Standard’s blog and in an article that arming merchant vessels and increasing Navy patrols may help, but nothing will work quite so well as finding and attacking the pirates on shore (in Somalia), something the Russians have suggested.

Chambliss’ win in Georgia could spell a tough midterm election for Dems in 2010. When Saxby Chambliss beat Jim Martin by 16 points in what was expected to be a very close race, Democrats lost their chance at a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air argues that Democratic gains in 2008 don’t mark an endorsement of their policies and warns them against moving any farther to the left. The win also means Senate Dems will be unlikely to step in and decide the outcome in Minnesota, where Al Franken is caught up in a protracted recount effort—not without a chance for 60 in the Senate, argues Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring.

Gay marriage won’t be all bad, but enough with the scorched-earth tactics, says Jonah Goldberg in an opinion piece for the L.A. Times. Goldberg cites vandalism against Mormon temples, mailing envelopes filled with white powder to Mormons, Mormon blacklists, and points out angrily that the Hollywood liberals who would decry McCarthyism are employing the same methods against proponents of Prop 8.

Don’t compare Bush to Nixon, says Fox News journalist Chris Wallace to film director Ron Howard. Wallace was at a film screening for Howard’s new movie, Frost/Nixon, about the former president who resigned after the Watergate scandal. Wallace argued that Nixon’s crimes were motivated purely by personal political gain, while President George W. Bush’s (referring to rendition and waterboarding) were motivated by a desire to protect his country. So there.

Today's Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor's Business Daily.

The current financial crisis has already cost more than World War II, writes financial blogger Barry Ritholtz, and that’s after adjusting for inflation. It’s hard to conceptualize $4.6165 trillion (Bloomberg reports it as $7.76 trillion), so try this: government bailouts, including the recent addition of Citigroup, amount to more than the cost of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the race to the moon, the savings and loan crisis, the Korean War, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, and NASA combined.

But CEO’s with fat salaries are just a distraction. If every oil company executive worked for free, writes Thomas Sowell at National Review, it wouldn’t lower the price of a gallon of gas by a dime or the cost of a car by even one percent. It’s an age-old story in which politicians give us someone to hate and blame in order to grab more power for themselves. Example: pols pressure banks into lending to people that normally wouldn’t qualify and when the economy turns sour, they blame deregulation and call for greater government control. He’s not having it.

A Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should worry conservatives, argues Paul Mirengoff at Power Line. Many conservatives espouse America’s rights to resist international pressures and to protect its own self-government, and they are willing to project American power to do so. While Obama’s picks for national security so far have shown no great desire to shake things up, he still inclines toward moving America into the international mainstream, Mirengoff writes, and Clinton has shown no indication she’ll act as a counterweight to that.

The Holy Land Foundation is going down, and CAIR should go with it, argues Scott Johnson. HLF, a Muslim charity, was found to have given financial support to Hamas, which the U.S. lists as a terrorist organization. In two separate posts, one at Power Line and one at National Review, Johnson lays out why it is one of the government’s most significant cases against terrorist conspirators in the U.S. since 9/11, and applauds the government’s outing of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the case.

At this rate, the Minnesota recount could drag on for months. Power Line blogger Scott Johnson has been following the recount, including state Senate hopeful Al Franken’s efforts to get some previously rejected absentee ballots back in the count. And he seems to be calling former Washington Democratic Party Chair Paul Berendt’s involvement in the process a “nightmare scenario.”

No need to discuss Barack Obama’s citizenship any more. Right Wing News blogger John Hawkins writes that he still receives e-mails asking why he has decided to stop writing about Obama’s legitimacy. Pointing to his post of a month earlier, he reminds those clinging to the belief that Obama is not really a citizen that the state of Hawaii has acknowledged they have a copy of his live birth certificate and that a newspaper clipping from 1961 proves he’s American. Discussion over.

Barack Obama won through media spinning and voter ignorance, or so seems to be the lesson of a popular video circulating on Youtube.

Should we take these Somali Jack Sparrows seriously? John Hawkins at Right Wing News finds the recent prevalence of pirates in the news almost laughable and argues the U.S. shouldn’t get involved (but not without first taking a few jabs at President-elect Barack Obama’s policy of talking to the enemy without preconditions). Mark Steyn, blogging for National Review, has a more serious take on the rise of piracy.

Eric Holder is the worst possible pick for Attorney General right now, according to the editors at National Review. He’d be softer on terrorists, and he helped push through several questionable pardons and commutations of sentence on behalf of former president Bill Clinton. Moreover, the editors write, he massages statistics to portray police as racial profilers, supports affirmative action, wants to stop the detention of enemy combatants at Gitmo, and “favors income redistribution to address the supposed root causes of crime.”

The Right is finding new hope in…Hillary Clinton? Noemie Emery, writing for The Weekly Standard, calls Clinton “The Great Right Hope” and traces how campaign 2008 transformed the former first lady into a social conservative champion of middle-America. Meanwhile, Right Wing News blogger John Hawkins simply can’t see how Obama supporters could be happy with a White House reprise for the Clinton clan.

Obama and Clinton have smeared Reaganomics; it’s time to get real about taxes. So argues Peter Ferrara in The American Spectator. Data from the IRS and the Congressional Budget Office actually show that the bottom 40 percent of income earners pay negative 3.8 percent of taxes, in fact drawing money out of income tax revenues, he writes. The real middle class, only have to pay 4.7 percent of all federal income taxes…and the whole system a result of Reagan’s Republican supply-side economics.

McCain seeks a fifth term in the U.S. Senate, and that’s not good for Republicans. McCain’s term is up in 2010. News of his intent was leaked and hasn’t been publicly confirmed, but already bloggers are reacting. Right Wing News’ John Hawkins calls McCain “uniquely destructive to conservatism and the Republican Party” and goes on the record saying he’d rather have a Democrat. So much for the Maverick.

Let’s not bail out the auto industry, too, writes Rich Lowry of National Review. Giants like GM and Ford have long mismanaged their empires, and the argument that the country can’t afford to lose 100,000 jobs casts Detroit automakers as job and welfare programs, he writes. Bailing them out would put us on track for a new wave of protectionism from free-market competition. And President-elect Obama has signaled he may be willing to do it.

On economic policy, Barack Obama’s not really about change. So holds Jonathan Weil at Bloomberg. The president-elect chose 17 people last week for his transition economic advisory board, and many of them ought not to be guiding his decisions on financial matters because they’ve got shady pasts of their own. One of them, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, was chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee when the bank “helped Enron Corp. cook its books.” There’s more.

Should the courts defer to the popular vote on Prop 8? Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Just, respectively the legal affairs editor and managing editor at The New Republic, have an on-going debate on the issue. The first two parts are here and here. In the third part, Rosen argues that when the Supreme Court’s constitutional authority over an issue is uncertain, as he says they are in the case of abortion and gay marriage, then it should defer to the people and to the Legislature. It’s a high-minded debate.

A black man is president; America no longer needs racial quotas, writes Ken Blackwell in National Review. Racial preference programs harm minorities, anyway, he writes. For example, a 20-percent minimum requirement for minority attendance at a school quickly becomes a 20-percent maximum in practice. Barack Obama has championed change and put forward a vision of a post-racial America, and that’s something everyone should celebrate.

What-next fest continues. David Brooks at the New York Times sees two camps in the struggle for philosophical control over the Republican Party: the Traditionalists, who want to cut taxes, cut big government, and restrict immigration; and the Reformers, who want to address inequality and middle-class economic worries and who tend to see global warming as a more serious issue. His prediction? The Traditionalists will win the near-term battle, but the outcome of the war is uncertain. Over at National Review, Deroy Murdock’s mantra: “What would Reagan do?”

What about Sarah Palin? She appeared in an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren yesterday, covering everything from the clothes fiasco to why she feels the McCain-Palin ticket lost. Part one is below. Part two is here.

Michael Ramirez cartoon for November 6, 2008, Investor's Business Daily.

No finger-pointing, just take time to regroup. That’s the major push of a piece by the editors of National Review. They find hope in the fact that voters haven’t rejected conservative ideals outright (President-elect Barack Obama only won by a six-point margin, after all). Now is the time to devise a clear agenda and make a new pitch to voters in advance of the elections in 2010 and 2012. But one dissenter in their ranks sees Tuesday as a wholesale disaster.

Republicans should stop trying to appeal to moderates and beef up their conservative platform. Right-wing blogger John Hawkins lays out his top seven reasons why the party needs to move to the right. In brief, moderates don’t have a uniform ideology, so it’s impossible to build a platform around them; moderates don’t give as much money to campaigns; and moderates tend not to know much about politics, so they’re easily swayed by the left-wing media.

Reluctant concessions from the right. Talk radio personality Hugh Hewitt congratulated Obama on his victory, though his prayer for Obama’s wisdom and judgment and “for his safety and the safety of his country, and for the continued prosperity and greatness of America” seem a subtle warning that we’re going to need it. Bill Dyer, a guest-blogger for Hewitt’s Townhall page, was not so subtle.

Obama is bad for the economy, and it showed when the stocks dropped after news of his victory, writes John R. Hinderaker. His broker attributes some of the decline in the market in recent months to investors’ apprehension of an Obama presidency. So Hinderaker expresses surprise that so many employees on Wall Street invested in the Obama campaign. Of course, the nation is in a recession, and another bit of news was at play: analysts are expecting a Labor Department employment report on Friday to be bleak.

Obama may have bought the election with a fundraising campaign that broke records and employed questionable tactics, including accepting money from foreign donors. An article in Newsmax claimed the press was lax for not holding Obama accountable after he reneged on his commitment to talk to John McCain about using public financing. It also referred to an investigation by its own correspondent back in September which uncovered thousands of dollars donated using fictitious names like Good Will. Bloomberg reported that Obama’s fundraising campaign may forever change the way presidential election campaigns are financed in the future.

Sarah Palin takes more heat, as previously off-the-record news about quarrels and questionable behavior with McCain staff and her spotty knowledge of geography were uncovered. Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron appeared on the conservative show “The O’Reilly Factor” to report what he knew, and while the the typically pugnacious and quick-witted Bill O’Reilly challenged some of Cameron’s findings, he didn’t seem to be on his game in defending her.

Voters don’t know what socialism means, anymore. Hop to it, McCain. In the 21st part of an on-going series entitled “The Audacity of Socialism,” Investor’s Business Daily argues that the post-Cold War generation doesn’t really understand what socialism’s about, so when Republican candidate John McCain decries Democratic rival Barack Obama’s policies as socialist, he better explain what he means. IBD takes a minute to educate us while maintaining that, yes, Obama does appear to be a socialist.

Too many pundits and politicians practice wackonomics. That’s the tendency to explain the complex beast of economics in the simplest terms of greed, according to economist Walter E. Williams. When the price of oil goes up, these wackoeconomists blame greedy executives, so as the price of crude oil dropped gradually from $147 to $64 a barrel after July, the natural conclusion should have been that the same executives were feeling less greedy. Of course, that’s not what happens, and wackonomics doesn’t really add to anyone’s understanding of the economy.

Sarah Palin takes a lot of heat—Obama and Biden deserve as much or more, writes Victor Davis Hanson. After all, recalling FDR on TV in 1929 or referring to Hezbollah as out of Lebanon doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Hanson lays out more reasons to ridicule the Obama-Biden ticket and wonders why the two aren’t getting more heat in the mainstream media.

Conservatives who bash Sarah Palin are in it for themselves. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan writes that after seven weeks on the campaign trail, Palin doesn’t seem to have what it takes to be vice president and that “she doesn’t think aloud. She just . . . says things.” Pam Meister, editor of Family Security Matters expressed confusion over why “beautiful, accomplished women” like Noonan would want to attack another beautiful, accomplished woman like Sarah Palin for no other apparent reason than that she drops her G’s and says “moms and dads” instead of “mothers and fathers.” Meister implied Noonan’s major motivation for criticizing Palin is that she may be under consideration for press secretary in an Obama administration (according to Meister’s unnamed source, of course). The blog RedState takes an even harder line toward such conservative turncoats: they should never be listened to or employed by any Republicans or conservatives ever again.

More Republicans call for Senator Ted Stevens to resign after he was convicted on seven felony counts including corruption. However, many seem to think it would be better if he waits until after winning his re-election so that the Republican Party can appoint his successor. That’s classy, people.

Why you shouldn’t vote for Obama in two weeks. Chicago political talk radio host Guy Benson, Katharine Ham of the Weekly Standard, and Hot Air editor and contributor Ed Morrissey offer their “closing argument” in the case against Barack Obama for president. They have created an extensive expose covering Obama’s record on abortion, taxes, radical associations, foreign policy judgment, apparent disdain for the heartland, his use of the race card, and his lack of accomplishments. Ham and Benson get right out and admit they’re conservatives, but say they’re doing their best to be objective by offering tons of video clips and links to supporting articles.

National Review Online to CNN: Shame on you for misrepresenting our stuff. When CNN’s Drew Griffin interviewed Sarah Palin on Tuesday, he mentioned an article in the print edition of National Review “saying that, you know, I can’t tell if Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt or all of the above.” Byron York, who wrote the article, responded with a post that included a partial transcript of the interview and part of the article for comparison. He directed an open question to Griffin or his producer: do you think you fairly represented my article? York’s colleague, Rich Lowry, vented even harder. And Talking Points Memo appeared to agree with NRO. Bad CNN.

Don’t go overboard trying to defend same-sex marriage, says conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt. Some opponents of California’s Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriages through an amendment to the state constitution, have found the Catholic Church too daunting a foe, Hewitt suggests, which explains why they are instead targeting Mormons. An Article VI blog post details (after a long-winded introduction) how some Prop 8 opponents (including a Daily Kos blogger) are effectively trying to disenfranchise Mormon voters.

Biden’s speech is working against Obama, or at least that’s how it’s being played. Democratic V.P. candidate Joe Biden told a crowd at a Seattle fundraiser on Sunday that Barack Obama would be tested early in his presidency by enemies overseas, and called for his supporters to stand by him no matter how unpopular his response might appear (and he almost guaranteed that it would look like the wrong way to respond). John McCain used the speech to argue that the country doesn’t need a president who may invite another international conflict, but William Kristol at The Weekly Standard says McCain needs to go further by highlighting that Obama’s own running mate seems certain that he will be or at least appear weak in the face of a coming crisis. McCain needs to challenge Obama to explain exactly how he might respond to a conflict in Iran, Russia, or any of the other unnamed regions that might lash out (Biden said four or five areas came to mind but never named them).

Mainstream media are pulling punches against Obama and the Democrats, Richard A. Viguerie writes at Newsmax.com. They have reported the outrage and vitriol of Republican politicians and rally-goers, but downplay the bad behavior of Democrats. And they are minimizing stories about Obama’s more suspicious associations: convicted felon Tony Rezko, who was a major financial supporter early on; and ACORN, an organization being investigated for voter fraud.

Why are they pulling punches? Because the left hates anti-communists even more than they like communists, writes Paul Kengor, a professor of politics at Grove City College in Pennsylvania who has researched and written about the history of communism in America. Perhaps because of memories of McCarthyist witch hunts or because of how public schools teach the history of communism, Americans have strong reactions to anti-communist sentiments. So “when they hear that Barack Obama has deep roots with communist radicals like Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis, (they) don’t care; they don’t get it,” he writes. For Kengor, that means conservatives are in for frustrating days ahead.

In fact, we could be witnessing the end of conservatism altogether, according to Mona Charen. The doom-speak isn’t constrained to those who hate or fear the Bush regime, apparently. Charen writes that an Obama victory and a Democratic super-majority in Congress could invite threats to First Amendment free speech rights and, indeed, a full-blown depression. And since liberal reforms are never undone, we’re looking at a permanent drift from conservatism.

Hugh Hewitt—three questions for Obama I’d like to hear at tonight’s debate: will you support U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into Illinois politics (which has already led to the conviction of pal Tony Rezko), will you continue funding the national missile defense shield at current levels or higher, and will you keep the current funding levels for the Department of Defense with special appropriations for Iraq?

Paul Krugman is dead (career-wise), at least if you agree with Donald Luskin. Krugman was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, but Luskin argues he hasn’t been a real economist in a decade. His columns for The New York Times are leftist rants written far below the talent and eloquence he once displayed, which Luskin compares to Nobel prize-winning astronomers doing a column on astrology.

Was the Palin pic too realistic? Newsweek is catching flak for not retouching a cover photo of the Alaska governor and Republican V.P. candidate because they have supposedly gone out of their way to make Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama look good. Apparently (and you have to see the magazine in person to notice) Palin’s showing too many wrinkles, pores and facial hairs.

McCain got mixed reviews from right-wing bloggers after last night’s debate. Conservative blogger John Hawkins surveyed the responses and came up with three general categories: those who thought McCain barely won, those who thought the debate was dull and did nothing to help McCain, and those who were mortified by McCain’s housing bailout.

Community organizers with ties to Obama may sound more like racketeers to some. Following the raid upon the Las Vegas headquarters of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) on suspicion of voter fraud (allegedly registering the Dallas Cowboys’ starting lineup), Modern Conservative blogger Brad O’Leary wrote a piece digging into the organization’s shady history and its ties to presidential candidate Barack Obama. Here’s an organization, he writes, “that was beyond knee-deep in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failures which have riveted our economy.” Socialism is still the great evil.

But don’t overreact! A guy in England claims he was shot simply for wearing an Obama T-shirt. I had to include this. It’s a reminder that politics are just the rules we create to ensure our disputes get settled peacefully (if loudly). Ignore the law and violence becomes legislator.