Barack Obama started his final jog up the White House steps by opening his own quasi-official government website. Calling itself ‘the office of the president-elect’, it purports to present the agenda of the newcomer. In actuality, it is a rehash of the Obama for president campaign website, registered by the same individuals and sloppily copied at that. Indeed, some comparisons to the McCain campaign’s positions still existed earlier today. I make that distinction because the site is constantly in flux, which wouldn’t be unusual in itself, but given that its showcasing a faux-government entity, that’s a bit disconcerting.

There are a lot more troubling aspects to this site than just lazy editing. The new president seems to want people’s names and addresses for an unlisted reason, most likely in order to net more names for campaign fundraising in the future– remember that the Obama campaign seems to have purposefully disabled all credit card safety checks that are routinely in place for online merchants, including address verification, in order to allow people to funnel money in as quickly and as illicitly as possible. To put it in terms more familiar for our lefty friends, wouldn’t you have raised an eyebrow if George Bush opened a site asking you to leave a little story and all your personal details/contact information? Especially in the age of telecom wiretaps and supposed government abuses?

The absolute worst part of the site, which has since been scrubbed clean, was a section stating that Obama wanted to make it mandatory for middle school, high school, and college students to complete lengthy commitments to community service. Now we’re treated to a more vague extolation of the virtues of public service and promise of free candy (and college) for those willing to sign up. It’s quite a bit less threatening, but a testament to who Barack Obama has shown himself to be: namely someone willing to say absolutely whatever he needs to in order to garnish popular support, even if it directly contradicts what he’s said mere moments before. You can see the original and edited versions here, it’s pretty sick stuff.

Why is it wrong to ask for compulsory service in this country you might ask? Well, beyond the hysteria on the left in the 2004 campaign about the prospect of Bush secretly reinstating the draft, it goes against the foundation of individual freedom in this country to force servitude. It is your American right to either give the country your all or to give it nothing. That’s the basis of the free market, of our individual liberty, and the often-quoted-but-never-located separation of church and state. As part of this now edited effort, Obama also promises to create ‘Classroom Corps’ to help plan lessons and educate the underprivileged. I’m just wondering if these government-sponsored administrative branch observers will be unbiased additions to the classroom or something more intrusive. Two guesses, if you need ‘em.

So here’s some small crumbs of confirmation before the main course arrives at Che Obama: he’ll toss anything against the wall to see if it sticks. I feel better already.

Update: Allah at Hot Air picks it up.

If one day of carping in the blogosphere is enough to get The One to reverse himself, maybe we can work with this guy after all.

Work with him? Why not? It’s easy to compromise when you have no intention of sticking to your position. It just makes finding out if you’ve actually had the last word on an issue a touch more difficult to discern. Who knows what pandering promises the next day holds?

When I originally made this post, I couldn’t have dreamed how right I was.

In a bid to end speculation that Kim Jong Il had suffered a stroke, North Korean officials released a new picture of the “Dear Leader” in apparently good health. But is the image genuine?

A Times Online reader with an eye for detail has pointed out that there is something shady about the shadows in the picture.

A close inspection of the photograph published yesterday by the Korean Central News Agency suggests that the shadow cast by Mr Kim is very different to those cast by the soldiers standing alongside him.

I’d still really like to know who is running that country right now, and how they’re going to test Barack Obama once he gets into office. That isn’t a criticism of the Messiah, I’m willing to give him a chance on it, but I hope to hell that his team is paying attention.

It’s always been a mistake to trust and/or attempt to verify with the North Koreans. John Bolton, whose wisdom knows not the bounds of mere mortal facial hair, wrote an open letter to Barry earlier this week that is worth a read. Plus any excuse to repost my old parodies is always going to be taken.

Personally, I was more impressed with Fox News’ magic draw-as-you-go big board that they played around with all night, but CNN drew a lot of media attention for their debut of the field reporter ‘hologram’. The only problem was that it wasn’t a hologram at all, which was painfully obvious from the video, merely instead more green screen work like we already see from cable news every day. Instead of just projecting a fake background or a new HEY LOOK HERE graphic in the bottom corner, CNN decided to bring the whole reporter home.

I don’t understand why they wasted all that special effect technology to bring her back to the studio. If it were me, I would’ve had my reporters reporting LIVE VIA ‘HOLOGRAM’ from THE MOON, DINOSAUR ISLAND or THE INSIDE OF A COLON. I think that really would have improved their ratings. Instead we just had a few short segments of Wolf Blitzer staring slightly off into space– which isn’t really that different than normal now that I think about it.

In an article reviewing the lackluster CNN ploy Don Reisinger inadvertently catches the truth of what has actually happened this election cycle.

I applaud CNN for at least trying something new. But if show producers are smart, they’ll shelve their "hologram" idea, and move on to something bigger and better, like transporting Ms. Yellin back and forth between Chicago and New York next time. I think that’ll keep them busy for a while, and help us enjoy some quality programming, while they’re trying to figure out how to reconstruct atoms.

I know the idea of a "hologram" is alluring to some. But let’s not allow our hopes for the future cloud our judgment.

CNN’s "hologram" was dumb.

It’s a little late to issue warnings about not letting ‘hope’ cloud our judgment.

Anyone who spent half an hour watching the returns last night after 7PM ET could have told you how the election was going to end up. I didn’t watch it with the fervor that I watched the 2000 or 2004 elections because quite frankly I didn’t have that much of a dog in this fight. Yes, I was hoping that the Messiah wouldn’t be anointed by the masses, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled over the prospect of a McCain victory. John McCain was never the choice of a conservative, nor did any other evil neoconservatives that I know feel their heart flutter in a Maverick love affair.

As the networks showed just how hesitant they were to call some of what we thought were to be reliable red states, I tuned out. I think that it is fair to measure disappointment by the amount of alcohol that one consumes in response to election results. I ended up drinking a measly beer and a half last night. I’m sure that the straight talk express was past the legal limit, but I can’t imagine that many ‘true’ conservatives actually felt that upset that we didn’t win. There is an important distinction to be made between disappointment that our side didn’t win and the disappointment that our rivals prevailed.

The latter is much more palpable, representing the bulk of Republican/Conservative/Bitter Typical White Person disappointment. As we rightly warned the Democrats in 2004, it is exponentially more difficult to win an election by voting against someone than it is to win an election by having genuine enthusiasm for a candidate of your own. (More on that later)

Barack Obama was able to create a sense of excitement among voters that we haven’t seen in a very long time. It doesn’t appear that Obama managed to truly redraw the map or create a flood of new voters as had been foreseen in many liberal crystal balls, but he energized his base and they did indeed turn out in force. The McCain plan to ‘appeal to the masses’ at the expense of the conservative core was a failure like we all anticipated it to be. Given who John McCain has been, and I have no qualms with his independent nature, it was the campaign he had to run. That doesn’t mean it the right opposition to a charismatic young star like Obama– it was the candidate we were dealt by a weak field and a poorly timed primary process.

As we saw the campaign develop it became clear to me that McCain wasn’t interested in playing hardball. Despite what the mainstream media reported, the McCain attack ads were late in the game, incoherent, and ignored the most potent (and legitimate) arguments against Barack Obama. Perhaps it was lingering scorn at how he was sunk by the Bush campaign in 2000 or just the strange sense of honor that McCain has followed his entire career (I choose to attribute the atrocious McCain-Feingold to this instead of deliberate curtailing of rights or naiveté) that kept him from hitting the Messiah hard, but whatever the reason– the attacks never stuck. McCain couldn’t even bring himself to the level of his own ads at the debates despite being given every opportunity to follow up on the love taps he’d been dishing out.

Blame is being placed at every foot to the ideological right of Larry Craig’s tapping loafers for the failure this time around. Palin is being torpedoed by staffers and George Bush is being blamed as per law. (I’m sure it was something passed around 2004 that requires George Bush to be complicit in any evil and/or unfortunate deed or event that takes place.) Since it appears from the numbers game that it was a lack of base turnout that contributed greatly to our loss, I think that pummeling Palin is out. If anything she shored up support by the conservative base, becoming the spoonful of sugar that helped most of us take our McMedicine. I find it hard to believe that George Bush is ultimately to blame for the election results either, as George Bush actually won reelection as George Bush in 2004. The fact alone that he was able to be reelected, with a much wider margin of victory, negates full blame for me. If voters considered McCain to be George Bush, George Bush himself shouldn’t have even come close to beating Kerry given that the assaults on his character and conduct haven’t really gained any new material since the 2004 campaign.

We can blame the economy and Bush’s support of the bailout, but McCain ended up supporting it as well. If the financial crisis were truly to be behind the loss this year, the margins should have been wider. We should have seen quite a bit more eroded support than we did. It was the number one issue to be sure, but it was the fault of the liberal members of Congress who forced the financial institutions to lend money to people who couldn’t repay it. George Bush fought against the rampant credit run-up, as did the Republicans, and it was so obvious that even Saturday Night Live acknowledged it! That McCain couldn’t make this fact stick, or even be bothered to espouse it to the public at every (or any) opportunity was a massive failure on the part of the campaign.

It was McCain’s campaign that controlled access to Sarah Palin. If she were truly the incompetent that she has been portrayed to be then it was up to the campaign to ready her for those “tough” questions and find her the proper venues to play to her strengths. They did neither, just as they didn’t go with the strongest attacks against Obama. We begged McCain to take the gloves off, people literally begged at the rallies, and the best we ever got was the last three minutes of his acceptance speech. That passion and power never showed itself again and it was that more than Palin or Dubya that drowned us.

The choice between McCain and Obama for independents never rested on the facts. McCain’s liberal tendencies didn’t stand a chance. The vast majority of casual Obama voters don’t really care about his positions, evidenced by their blind acceptance of his innumerable 180 degree turns on the issues. Instead they were truly inspired by hope and change. They pulled the lever literally hoping that things would get better. The nuts and bolts of how that might happen didn’t matter as much as the smile and smooth baritone of a good politicker. This fact doesn’t even bother them. This might change depending on the competence exhibited by Barry’s administration over the next four years, but don’t expect the mainstream media to be any more critical than they were during this campaign.

The best thing we have going for us is the apathy of the hanger-on. Those who thought Obama is the man with all the answers will find out that without constant rallies and get out the vote meetings that politics is truly boring and that one man doesn’t have all the answers. Hopefully by 2012 we will have a more charismatic and base-driven set of ideological leaders prying for the primaries.

All this aside, I don’t want it to appear that I’m bitter about Obama’s win. One thing that I think will be ignored by the left is the level of non-insanity that we exhibit at this loss. You don’t see the echo chamber filling with expletives and allegations of election stealing. You won’t. We respect the process and the office of the presidency. Obama won it, he’ll get his shot. Even though I disagree with him, I wish him well. I want our country to succeed, whoever is at the helm.

We’ll just have to see what happens and how quickly Biden’s prediction of testing will come to pass.

Keep the faith, my friends.*

More at: Right Wing Nut House | Michelle Malkin | Hot Air |

*At least we don’t have to hear that tired phrase anymore.

I think that it’s safe to dabble in a little fortunetelling today without jinxing our chances with the Maverick next Tuesday. Rick Moran writes an excellent post over at Right Wing Nut House about the rumblings among the bigger players on our side of the blogosphere over what we must do after the election in order to not just survive, but thrive and compete with the nutroots for the foreseeable future.

The growing consensus seems to be that we must form a more unified online collective akin to those found on the left in order to amplify our message delivery. In theory this isn’t a bad idea, but like so many things that seem good on paper and involve collectives, it just doesn’t sit right with me when we start to get into the nuts and bolts of it.

To explain my point (and shamelessly piggyback off Rick) here’s a quote from Patrick Ruffini:

What will it take to turn this around? If you’re a conservative blogger, the question you need to ask yourself is this. Is the main purpose of your blog to express your personal opinion? Or is its primary purpose to build political power for a cause? If you cannot answer yes to the latter, you’re probably not going to be comfortable with making the changes necessary to make online conservatism a political force to be reckoned with.

Maybe it’s just my inexperience with the larger blogosphere, but I’ve never thought that the point of this mess of repetitive message blogs and grammar-challenged comments was to enforce our political will on the masses. Are we aiming our clinged-to guns at the Washington power elite, hoping to sway them as some sort of massive online special interest group? Is that what I’ve been writing and photoshopping about for the last two years? I certainly didn’t think it was.

This blogging game has always seemed to me to be about the people. After all, there are only so many hits that you can muster if your entire readership comes from government building IP addresses. Even if you’ve got an entire team of bureaucrats lapping up every last word you brilliantly clack out at your keyboard, is that what you’re doing it for?

I have absolutely no official campaign experience. I have no Washington connections and my media experiences are few and far between. I started writing all the swill that I’ve been selling because my mouth wasn’t big enough, and my lungs weren’t strong enough, to reach enough people by shouting out my window like I usually would have. Plus the noise violation fines were starting to pile up and monthly server costs are practically free these days.

And if we were to follow the Daily Kos model, falling into lockstep and sealing ourselves off from any dissenting opinion, is that really going to help the conservative beliefs that we have gain power? What sort of convoluted, pandering pap will that breed on the right when you consider what it’s done to a bunch of people on the left who used to be content drawing flowers and smiley faces on their backpacks between Starbucks lattes and rides on public transportation? Over the last eight years, as the left’s internet presence has grown stronger, the online representation of their base has lost its mind.

Is that what we really want? And if we do somehow manage to come together, patting each other on the back while we fill the country’s mug with milquetoast middle-of-the-road election-winning conservatism, do we really think our agenda will be that much further advanced? Let’s take a look at the most important things to the apparently all-powerful nutroots and see how well they’ve done with getting their agenda implemented.

They wanted to get out of Iraq. Hmm, nope, that didn’t work out for them. They wanted substantive investigations of the Bush administration. Last time I checked, Dick Cheney was still at large. They wanted to keep us from drilling offshore. Wrong direction there, at least temporarily. They wanted to keep the assault weapons ban. I’m pondering the purchase of a scary looking AK as we speak, so how’d that turn out?

Is that enough examples? So, yes, of course by becoming the little lockstep-walking automatons with iron mousepads and a common diluted message we could increase our influence. If we embrace whatever the RNC puts forward for us, we can definitely increase our influence, but we lose what makes this the most fun diversionary hobby I’ve ever had. (And don’t take the term hobby lightly or think that it reflects on how serious I take the political game. If one of you bigwigs would hire me, I’d much rather do it for a living. I’m just stating the case as it currently is.)

The great thing about the right side of the blogosphere today is that it is such a mash-up of ideas and ideologies. Yes, we all share some basic frameworks that make us conservatives. We have so much to bicker over as well, and I don’t want to lose that for the sake of perceived party representation in Washington. I’ve learned more from the people who I disagree with than I could have ever hoped to if we started playing purge games like the kooks did when dissatisfied Clinton voters didn’t drop into line mere moments after the primaries ended.

In other words, organization is good. Anything that gets my ill-informed opinion to more people who might be inclined to agree with it is good. If it gets our heavy-hitters out there for the base to soak up, good. But disregarding the national issues that people across the country actually care about and want to chime in on in order to whip the grass-roots into shape over district number whathaveyou? No. I’ll gladly be kept to my little slice of obscurity with my (sometimes) funny pictures before this becomes something slavish. That isn’t what we need to prosper.

We didn’t need the MSM to win elections before, we don’t need homogenization of the blogosphere to win readers now.

If you’ve stood around a water cooler with other conservatives over the last few weeks, then you’ve no doubt felt the dread in the air. It seems like so many of us have already accepted the Messiah’s coronation as inevitable. Depending on which poll you read, it’s easy to come to this conclusion. Even the best case scenarios for John McCain are described in the mainstream media as ’slim possibilities’. So what are we to do?

Personally, I like the prospect that many on the left invented for the inner sanctums of the Bush white house over the last eight years. They envision a small cadre of characters that are completely cut off from reality. That’s what I’ll be doing until the election. I’m going to hunker down in my mental ‘undisclosed location’ until November 5^th. At that point we’ll know where all the smoke is being blown.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to pretend that John McCain is the front runner here. I’m not going to completely ignore the polls. I’m just not going to accept any assumptions about likely voters or how the uninformed undecided are leaning. Not even if we see the calvary arriving at the 11^th hour for the Straight Talk Express.

In short: no one has any idea how this will turn out. Let’s accept that and try to enjoy ourselves. These kids have the right idea.

Well, if the thrilling preview I posted for you yesterday wasn’t enough, now we have more casual conversations with Barack to confirm just how far left his administration will be. This newly rediscovered audio, surprise surprise that it didn’t make it out in time to be featured in a debate, not only backs up the socialist tripe that Obama handed Joe the Plumber, it goes quite a bit further.

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendancy to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

I don’t think the term ‘tax cut’ will even be relevant if Obama follows through with a quarter of the political ideology he lays bare in this interview. Is it even considered taxation if you’re converting the United States into a planned economy? The question of respecting the constitution can be thrown out the window as an issue as well. It is now quite clear that Obama understands the definition and role that the constitution plays, he just wants to tear it apart and plow through a new form of government. That is scary.

I’ve left the bolding in place as originally emphasized at Stop the ACLU but I want to focus on this sentence, which is as damning as it gets.

To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.

In other words the court didn’t deliberately interpret the Constitution in such a way as to purposefully break it and go against our country’s legal foundation– something that seems to be criminal in the opinion of Barack Obama.

That takes some stones to say, my friends. I’ve seen people on the left bend over backwards trying to force original intent about any number of issues, stretching logic to the limit in order to invent protections and applications. They have always at least made the attempt to work within the legal framework of the country though! They have always tried to justify themselves in the eyes of our founders. Here Obama lays it out that not only doesn’t he care what the original intent of the Constitution is, but he has no qualms in saying that we need to break it so that America can be what he wants it to be.

Actually, that’s what Obama has been saying for the last year and a half, just in more vague terms. Obama is for HOPE and CHANGE. It just wasn’t the hope and change that most of you were anticipating. I have a feeling that should he win on November 4th, you’ll see plenty of new protections and clauses come out of those time-honored pages of the Constitution, changes that you couldn’t have even dreamed were there.

It’s a scary time. The perfect horror story for Halloween.

More at Hot Air & Right Wing Nut House.