Here are 30 errors that doomed McCain. If he had done more of these things particually, like opposing the bailout, I would have considered voting for him.
Here’s what my friend Iain Murray writes, “In short, it’s the economy, stupid. Surprisingly for a self-described maverick, it appears to have been Sen. McCain’s desire to cling to the self-serving nostrums of Wall Street and the Beltway that doomed him.”
For Obama to be an effective President, he needs to govern like a moderate like Bill Clinton. If he governs to far to the left, as his record suggests, he’s going to be in for a hard four years. America is a right-leaning country. Last night’s results did not change that.
Here’s Jim Moran on the simplistic notion that people who have money should be entitled to keep it:
That’s right. And Arlington is so far left they keep electing this immoral piece of work. Here he is in all his classiness:
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This first shot is just how the pictures looked with my camera on the standard settings:
It’s an okay picture, but nothing special. Consider this shot:
For this picture I followed Ken Rockwell’s advice and used these settings: Go to MENU > Shooting Menu (camera icon) > Optimize Image > Custom > (set Saturation to + and Color Mode to IIIa) > – - Done > OK. If you forget to select “- – Done” and hit OK it won’t remember these settings.
The vivid color mode didn’t make a blah picture great, but it makes the colors more interesting. Looking at the second picture I’m glad I got up at 5:30am to drive to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
A center-right swing voter, on his wife’s suggestion, canvassed for Obama. Here’s what he learned:
I’ve learned that this election is about the heart of America. It’s about the young people who are losing hope and the old people who have been forgotten. It’s about those who have worked all their lives and never fully realized the promise of America, but see that promise for their grandchildren in Barack Obama. The poor see a chance, when they often have few. I saw hope in the eyes and faces in those doorways.
Giving people hope should not be a sufficient reason to vote for someone. Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Adolph Hitler all gave people hope. But feeling good about a politician should not be a sufficient reason to vote for that politician, as the example of Hitler shows.
Policies matter. When Obama is elected he isn’t going to spend time giving people hope. He might do some good things, like get out of Iraq, close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and end warrantless wiretapping of Americans. Other than that, he will increase regulation and taxes making America even less economically competitive. That’s not hope I can believe it. But that’s why I voted for Bob Barr.
Jason Kottke, who writes a great blog opines:
This continues to be annoying: yesterday’s IDEA conference had 12 speakers, all men. Blech. The Web 2.0 Summit has the same problem. And I stopped updating this because it got too depressing.
One thing I like about being a libertarian is that I don’t have to consider the sex of a speaker, in addition to whether that speaker would give a good talk. Instead, I just have to ask, who would be the best speaker? Sexism is real, just as racism is real. But neither are going to helped with some kind of quotas. And neither is going to be helped if we fixate on peoples sex or race.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., I want to live in a nation where people will be not be judged by the color or of their skin, or their sex, but by the content of their character.
I have a dream.
A story in the Washington Post has quote today from President Bush:
“I said, ‘You know, I’m not going to change as a person because of politics or Washington’ — that’s what I said when I left,” Bush said. “I think they appreciate that. I want them to know that, you know, even though I had to deal with a lot of tough issues, that I’m still the same person that they knew before and that, you know, I’m wiser, more experienced, but my heart and my values didn’t change.”
Bush’s problem is not that his heart or values changed, his problem is that I have no idea what he values are. He doesn’t value fiscal conservationism, or otherwise he would have fought the big spenders from his own party in Congress. He will be remembered for the incredible increase in federal spending he presided over.
He has an almost limitless belief in the power of big government. As a result, he thought we could easily create a new society in Iraq and that the financial situation could be easily remedied through enormous amounts of spending. He was wrong.
Bush values might not have changed, but he will be remembered as destroying his party because America doesn’t share his values.
