I guess when you give historic speeches every other day for a year the magic sort of wears off.

Can't wait to see what tomorrow's polls bring.

My takeaway from this speech:

Government can do anything.

I've been wanting a Tiffany bracelet...

My sentiments, exactly.

But the fact remains that the Democratic race was amazingly close; Clinton's 18 million votes and 1,896 delegates are just not going to disappear as if they never happened. I don't believe there's ever been a modern-day candidate who has claimed the nomination after losing New York and California and Ohio and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Florida and Texas and California and Massachusetts and Tennessee and…you get the picture. That's why this is still a problem.

There is something fundamentally and freakishly wrong about this observation, however factual it may be. Will this be a grenade with the pin pulled, rolling around the Democrats' feet until November?

What was it that Dohrn's husband and fellow domestic terrorist Billy Ayers said? "Guilty as hell and free as a bird. America is a great country."

Both are buddies of Our Saviour.

This begs the big question: Why in the hell would a woman abort a fetus that is survivable? This ought to be obvious to the cretins who think that repealing Roe v Wade would ban all abortions. Wrong, friendo. Roe v Wade guarantees a woman the right to abort her baby at any time during her pregnancy--and that includes the day before her due date. If you're okay with that, then good luck to you.

Any woman who aborts her fetus after waiting till the 35th or 40th week need to be in a mental hospital.

Progressives are never too far out of touch with their authoritarian roots.

It looks like an Obama presidency will give us a frank discussion on the issue of race. If by “frank” we mean, “shut up and quit you’re bitching, whitey. We’ll tell you what racism is.”

Seizing the means of linguistic production. Boutique Marxism enters the mainstream — and once it is accepted, it will most certainly undermine classical liberalism and the idea of free speech.

Or to quote Obama's friend Billy Ayer's former Weather Underground cohort Mark Rudd: "Up against the wall, motherfucker!" I won't delve into the physiological excitement that's bound to be running through all those sensitive emotional lefty psyches. It's way too gross.

By the way, Goldstein is right on about the effects of boutique Marxism--though the term "boutique" belies the lethal danger hidden in the concept. It's been obvious for a while now that Gramsci has been the one to bet on, not Marx himself.

Can anybody tell me why, when we possess technology so dazzling that pretty good face recognition is available in cameras that cost less than a hundred and fifty bucks—why does the Transportation Security Authority still insist on herding all air travellers, including such obviously unlikely terrorists as toddlers and little old ladies, through security checks that are slow, cumbersome, and, manifestly, stupid? Why doesn't the federal government get smart? We're in the eighth year of a Republican administration, for goodness's sake. And—really, the most disturbing question—why do we all put up with it?

Okay, maybe not one rhetorical question, but several. I could ask an even dozen more off the top of my head.

Hannity's Top 10 Items for Victory

1) To be the Candidate of National security:
a) Victory in Iraq
b) Fully support NSA, Patriot act, tough interrogations, keeping Gitmo open
c) A Candidate that pledges to NOT demean our military while they are fighting for their Country. eg Harry Reid: "the surge has failed", "the war is lost"
d) Candidate that promises to ensure that our veterans can live out their lives in dignity.

2) The Candidate who pledges to oppose Appeasement:
a) The Candidate will oppose any and all efforts to negotiate with dictators of the world in places like Iran, Syria, N. Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela without "pre-conditions"

3) The Candidate Pledges to support Tax CUTS, and fiscal responsibility:
a) The American people are NOT under taxed, Government Spends too much
b) The Candidate who Pledges to ELIMINATE and VOTE AGAINST ALL Earmarks
c) The Candidate pledges to BALANCE the budget

4) The Candidate Pledges to be a supporter of "Energy Independence"
a) supports Immediate drilling in Anwar and the 48 states
b) Building new refineries
c) Begin building and using Nuclear Facilities
d) expand coal mining
e) realistic steward of the environment
While simultaneously working with private industry to develop the new energy technologies for the future, with the goal being that America becomes completely energy independent within the next 15 years.

5) The Candidate pledges to secure our borders completely within 12 months:
a) build all necessary fences
b) use all available technology to help and support agents at the border
c) train and hire agents as needed

6) Healthcare:
The Candidate will look for Free-Market solutions to the problems facing the Healthcare industry, and will vigorously oppose any efforts to "nationalize healthcare".
a) The Candidate will fight for Individual health savings accounts, that includes "catastrophic insurance" for every American, so people can control their own healthcare choices.

7) Education:
a) The Candidate pledges to "save" American children from the failing educational system
b) The Candidate will fight to break the unholy alliance of the Democratic party and teachers unions, which at best has institutionalized mediocrity, and has failed children across the country
c) fight for "CHOICE" in education and let parents decide
d) fight for vouchers for parents

8) Social Security and Medicare:
a) The Candidate will "save" social security and medicare from bankruptcy.
b) Options will include "private retirement" funds so people can "control" their own destiny.

9) Judges
a) The Candidate vows to support ONLY judges who recognize that their job is to interpret the Constitution, and NOT legislate from the bench.

10) American Dream:
The Candidate accepts as their duty and responsibility to educate, inform, and remind people that with the blessings of Freedom comes a Great responsibility. That Government's primary goal is to preserve, protect and defend our God given gift of freedom.

That Government's do not have the ability to solve all of our problems, and to take away all of our fears and concerns. We need their pledge that we will be the candidate that promotes Individual liberty, Capitalism, a strong national defense and will support policies that encourage such...

It is our fundamental belief that limited Government, and Greater individual responsibility will insure the continued prosperity and success for future generations.

We the people who believe in the words of Ronald Reagan, that we are "the best last hope for man on this earth," "a shining city on a hill," and that our best days are before us if our Government will simply trust the American people.

So says a friend of Rich Lowry's. His friend also thinks HRC is trying to present herself as the new Scoop Jacskon. I have personally observed the potency of the antipathy held by the true left for Hillary. A complementary observation is that the center (whose votes will decide the election, as always) might well take that antipathy by the left as a kind of backhanded endorsement. All the more reason that Clinton would be the more formidable candidate for McCain, especially if she can successfully channel Jackson and Lieberman.

But she has to get nominated first. Imagine: Hillary almost, but not quite, succeeds in wresting the nomination from Obama. Nominatus interruptus, indeed! Oh, the humanity!

"I don't condone what he did 40 years ago [Daley said] but I remember that period well. It was a difficult time, but those days are long over.”

Oh boy, talk about a batting practice fastball over the heart of the plate. But I'll pass on it, and let Lileks take it:

It was a difficult time. What a wonderful absolution. Oh, we all went a little mad. Some of us listened to Steppenwolf, some of us bombed government buildings and plotted robberies that killed people, some of us were rotting in Vietnamese prisons having our teeth bashed out by torture experts. Those days are behind us now, best forgotten. (Unlike the McCarthy era, which will be the subject of 163 movies about the blacklist next year, bringing the total to 45,203.)

Yeah, sure, what's a few bombings in the name of revolution? Hell, we deserved it.

Hamas offers truce in return for 1967 borders

Leader of Islamic group makes statement after meetings with Carter

The leader of Hamas said Monday that his Palestinian militant group would offer Israel a 10-year "hudna," or truce, as implicit proof of recognition of Israel if it withdrew from all lands it seized in the 1967 Middle East War. [...}

Ha ha ha! Oh Hamas, you crack me up! Pull the other one! You guys could be the life of the party--now, where's Lenny Bernstein?

"...The 1950s are assumed, at least by children of the Sixties, to be a “conservative” era. But at home New Deal liberalism controlled all the levers of society and abroad the Communists had gobbled up half of Europe, neutered most of the rest, swiped China, were eyeing up other valuable real estate across the planet, and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment was inclined to accept this as a permanent feature of life to be “managed” rather than defeated.

The Republican minority in Congress were isolationists or country-club liberals, and their presidential nominees were “moderates” like Dewey or non-partisans like Ike. There was virtually no serious intellectual energy in American conservatism. The notion that in the early 21st century more Americans would identify themselves as “conservatives” than as “liberals” would have struck the elites of 50 years ago as preposterous: a scenario unimaginable outside the more fanciful dystopian science fiction... [snip]...

Then Bill Buckley showed up and was brilliantly effective. In the barren soil of the Fifties, he planted what became a mighty family tree that includes not just Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan but millions of other Americans. I’ve been amazed in recent days by the number of e-mails I’ve received from readers retelling essentially the same story across the decades: Buckley came to their college in the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, or Nineties, and the scales fell from their eyes. Or they were in the local library and found a stray copy of something called “National Review” that had somehow managed to penetrate the perimeter fence. Or they were flipping through the channels late at night and stumbled across this cool guy with a pencil effortlessly eviscerating some liberal panjandrum..."...

"There was virtually no serious intellectual energy in American conservatism." Absolutely spot on. I've come to the conclusion that the image of the "fifties" that is so reviled by the baby boomers is really a myth, a creation of Hollywood, really. Think of it: Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best were creations of the Hollywood studios and bear as little resemblance to everyday life in the fifties as Friends did to life in the early 2000's. And Steyn makes an observation that should be obvious: the fifties were the absolute low point of conservative ideological influence.

I'm pretty close with my praise of so-called great men or women, but it cannot be denied that WFB was a truly great man.

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."

Yes. That top ten percent of wage earners (you know, the ones that pay over 70% of the total income tax revenue, see table 6, here) need to pay some more.