McCain, R-Ariz., handily defeated Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., 68 percent to 23 percent in a voluntary survey of 4,293 active-duty, National Guard and reserve subscribers and former subscribers to Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times and Air Force Times.

Look for Obama to pull an Al Gore, and try to have the courts discount all the military votes.

Well, the proof is in the video. The President of the L.A. chapter of NOW (as in National Organization of Women) introduced Palin at a rally, with the words, “America, this is what a feminist looks like.”

Cool!

Paging Tammy Bruce! Tammy! Have you seen this?

Teachers at Soquel High School have agreed not to wear “Educators for Obama” buttons in the classroom after a parent complained that educators were attempting to politically influence his daughter and other students.

These teachers must not have much to do in the classroom, if they have all this time to waste on topics that have nothing to do with the curriculum. But I promised myself I wouldn’t rant, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll offer an alternative for those who just can’t keep from bringing the election into the classroom — an alternative that does not push a candidate or a party, and actually has something to do with learning the class material — and critical thinking, in the literal, and not the “think like a slobbering leftist” education school definition. Wow, how about that!

Student interest is a great motivator, particularly when you teach something many students find boring, or even intimidating, like I did. One thing we did that was very successful was build several applications with the tools we were going to cover that grabbed student interest when we said, “At the end of the semester, you’ll be able to do this, too.”

One of these was a simulation model that based on the scores for all of the games that season predicted the winner of the Superbowl (we had one for the NBA finals and another for the World Series, depending on which semester we were in).

So if you absolutely must address the election in class, here is one way you can do it where the students will actually learn something, and contains not a hint of advocacy or indoctrination.

Have students build an application that predicts the results of the election. Remind them that the more variables they incorporate, the more accurate it will likely be, and encourage them to make it as complex as they like.

You’d want to break them into teams to do this, and give them time to talk about what variables they would want to incorporate, and how. You should probably give them a list of sources for data, like realclearpolitics.com, gallup.com, and rasmussenreports.com. In fact, give them a whole class period to do nothing but plan their model, figure out where they’d get the data, and assign people in the team to do various tasks.

I’d give them a week to turn in the models. After going through them, you can pull several up with different results and as a class, pick apart the applications and discuss why they got different results (this is what is known as a learning experience). You can then, again as a class, discuss which of the models is/are most likely to accurately predict the results, and why. You can even give bonus points to the team whose model most accurately predicts the election.

See? You addressed the election, and you didn’t have them sing creepy Hitler Youth songs.

If you think about it, these models incorporate a lot of mathematical knowledge in many different areas, and all through the model. Take collecting the data, say, polls. How are they going to deal with the different levels of statistical error in different polls? How will they deal with different party weights in different polls? What, other than polls, will they use as input variables, and how will they incorporate them into the model? For example, if they’re going to look at the number of voters who went for Hillary in the primaries and turn that into support for McCain, how, exactly, are they going to do it? What algorithm will they use, and what will they base it on? And would they also want to use another variable, say, Democrat respondents who only lean Democrat in the election, or are undecided to calculate their Hillary conversion variable?

And what about actual election day statistics, will they use those? If so, which variables? How will they incorporate them?

You can turn just about anything into a real, learning experience in the classroom if you just think about it. Unfortunately, “thinking” seems to be an alien concept to many teachers these days.

The learning isn’t only in creating the models. The learning — and critical thinking — is also in analyzing the models and comparing them once they’ve been done. What makes a good model? What makes this model more accurate than that one? Would this be a more accurate model if we tweaked the algorithms, and if so, how would we tweak them? You get the idea.

When my students are working in teams, I usually migrate from team to team, playing devil’s advocate, and gently nudging them when they’re completely off track (I call this guided constructivism). With a project like this, I would probably limit my input to making sure they understood, and correcting fundamental errors, like only taking into consideration the popular vote. Oh. And I would only do something like this after the students had all of the necessary knowledge and skills to actually build a working application. Sorry, but if you think turning students loose on their own to do complex projects like this is a good way to introduce them to new skills, you have no business within a hundred miles of a classroom.

(We talked about doing this with one of the sports championships, don’t remember which now, but decided against it because making the data usable would require complex Excel text functions we had not covered in class. This would definitely not be a way to teach them how to build a simulation.)

Cross-posted at Kitchen Table Math

There was a day when people were content to be stupid in private. Thanks to the ‘net we can all share the moment with this dude.

welcome to the new america where stupid is a fashion accessory

Contains four of the basic food groups: Cream, butter, corn, and pork! Seriously, this is a great way to cook overly lean pork chops and keep them moist.

Corn with cream

4 ears corn
4 T. butter
1/2 c. heavy cream

Cut the corn from the ears, scraping the cob with the back of the knife over the bowl. Melt the butter over medium heat, then add the corn. Add the cream, lower the heat, and simmer for 15 minutes.

Note that it’s four of everything. If you want to cook more or less corn, it’s one T. butter and one ounce heavy cream per ear of corn.

Pork chops braised in cream

2 thick-cut pork chops
1/4 c. flour
salt and pepper
1 T. butter
3/4 c. heavy cream

Season the flour with salt and pepper, and coat the chops on both sides (you just want enough to protect them from the direct heat, not create a crust). Melt the butter and turn heat up high. Brown the chops, about five minutes per side. Add the cream, and turn the chops over a few times. Lower heat to a very low simmer, and cook about 15 minutes, until chops are done. Remove to a plate, then turn the heat high, and reduce the cream until thick. Pour over chops.

But I’m not going to talk about lard today. I’m going to talk about butter.

If you’ve ever tried cooking with butter, you’ve noticed that it burns at inconveniently low temperatures. But it isn’t the butter that burns; it’s the milk solids in the butter. Restaurants buy very high quality butter in bulk (the lower the milk solid content, the higher the quality), so butter you can cook with, without fear of burning, is hard to find, and very expensive when you find it. Butter actually has a very high smoking point, as high as lard, and almost as high as vegetable oil.

If you want that beautiful golden color, only butter will do it for you. Not oil, not lard (certainly not lard), not (shudder) shortening, nothing will give you that deep golden brown except butter.

The solution is clarified butter (AKA drawn butter, or in India, ghee). Directions for clarifying butter, at least all the directions I’ve seen, are almost uselessly vague, so here, in detail (most of which I’ve learned through trial and error) is how to clarify your own butter.

I do it two pounds at a time. You can clarify more or less. Note that clarified butter is very hard and brittle, very different from butter you buy. Milk solids spoil more quickly than the butter, so once clarified, butter should keep a good month or so in the refrigerator.

The smaller the circumference of the pan, the easier it is to do, so use a small sauce pan. If your butter is solid (that is, not in sticks), cut each pound lenghwise in half. Put the butter in the pan, and turn the flame on, very low. Simmer low.

When the butter is all melted, turn off the heat. Let it sit a good thirty minutes. This lets the milk solids settle out to the bottom of the pan.

Line a strainer with a double thickness of cheesecloth, run under cold water and thoroughly wrung out. With a slotted spoon, and without tipping the pan, remove the crust floating on the top. Now, very slowly pour the butter through the strainer, holding the pan steady throughout so you don’t mix the solids back up with the butter. You’ll see the whitish milk solids. Pour off as much as you can without the solids.

Refrigerate.

You can buy ghee — clarified butter — but it’s ridiculously expensive. Make your own.

Speaking of, back in the 18th century, Americans, like Brits, used suet extensively. In the 19th century for a lot of reasons, one of which was the large immigration of central and eastern Europeans, pork became America’s most consumed meat, and by the middle of the 19th century, suet had all but disappeared from recipes.

It’s a pity, because suet adds a woderful, deep, beefy flavor. You can buy suet (tallow, actually) in nearly any supermarket, but you have to render it. Here’s how.

Dice the suet and put it in a large pan. Turn the oven to 275, and put the pan in the oven. Check it every thirty minutes, pressing the still solid pieces of fat down into the melted fat. Some of these will become cracklings, and won’t melt. When you get to the point that you have nothing but rendered suet and cracklings, take it out of the oven, then strain into a container and refrigerate (like clarified butter, suet is very hard and brittle). Great stuff.

You would render lard the same way. Unlike the flavorless lard you buy in the store, home-rendered lard, like suet, is deeply flavorful.

Salted or unsalted butter?

Butter is salted to preserve it, not flavor it. This is why unsalted butter, which has a shorter shelf life, is more expensive. Once you adjust to unsalted butter on the table, and you do have to adjust, there’s no going back. Having said that, I buy salted and unsalted butter. I clarify salted butter, and use unsalted on the table (and in baking).

Buying exclusively unsalted is, in my opinion, silly, and a waste of money. Yes, usalted is going to be fresher, but I have yet to buy butter that had turned. I don’t see the point — other than chi-chi points — in buying only unsalted.

ABC News’ Teddy Davis, Rigel Anderson, and Arnab Datta Report: Speaking to Fox News on Friday, Sarah Palin indicated for the first time that she does not consider Barack Obama qualified to be commander in chief and sharply criticized him for saying last year that U.S. troops in Afghanistan are “just air raiding villages and killing civilians.”

Calling Obama “reckless,” Palin said that where she comes from Obama’s remarks “disqualify someone from consideration for the next commander-in-chief.”

“Some of his comments that he’s made about the war, that I think, in my world disqualify someone from consideration for the next commander-in-chief,” said Palin. “Some of the comments he’s made about Afghanistan, what we are doing there, ‘just air raiding villages and killing civilians.’ That’s reckless.”

She’s baaaaaaack!

And this:

Joe hasn’t mentioned anything yet about how this reminds him of FDR’s comments on the Cuban Missile Crisis in his interview with Arsenio Hall.

The Luntz focus group says Palin.

The Anchoress has a good roundup of reactions.

The sure proof that Palin shredded Biden? Reuters wants to check Palin’s ears for headphones. This sounds familiar. Didn’t the nutballs insist that Bush had an earpiece in one of the 2004 debates?

Indiana (R): Democrats had high hopes for defeating Gov. Mitch Daniels at the start of the cycle. Daniels had struggled through his first four years in office and even Republicans admitted he was vulnerable. Then two things happened: Daniels ran a very solid reelection campaign and Democrats nominated the wrong candidate in former Rep. Jill Long Thompson. Thompson has struggled to raise money and is off the television airwaves with just five weeks before the election. Um, disaster.

Of course, what they don’t tell you, again because Indiana is under the radar, is that this isn’t the first time poor Jill has run for office, and she’s always a disaster because she has the intellectual firepower of a mosquito. Biden on estrogen, as it were.

Having said that, Mitch rocks the house.

You can’t see Russia from Stanford University, but one of its newly decorated dorms sure feels like Sarah Palin’s hometown.

The all-male ground floor of the Serra building is designated for the “First Dudes,” and the women’s floor is reserved for “Hockey Moms.” Posters of snowmobiles, oil rigs and polar bears are smattered across the walls, and students who live in the building are known to don T-shirts that proclaim “Drill Baby Drill.”

It’s a longstanding tradition for Stanford’s student staff to decorate dormitories in themes drawn from popular culture, and traditionally movies and television shows have provided the inspiration. But when resident assistants from Serra dorm started brainstorming this year, they quickly gravitated toward a Palin theme. The Alaska governor, who had just accepted the vice presidential nomination, was becoming a phenomenon, and “Serra Palin Dorm” was born.

I’m kind of surprised they haven’t been brought up on some kind of moonbatty charges by the “diversity” or “sensitivity” squad. But the year’s yet young!

To test Nancy Pelosi’s hypothesis that after eight years of President Bush the economy is in far worse shape than it was under President Clinton at a time of “budget surpluses,” I went to Lending Tree to see what kind of mortgage terms I could get to buy my first home today. . . .

So what kind of offer did I get today in the midst of this horrible financial crisis? I got four offers, the lowest of which was a 15-year fixed-rate VA mortgage of 6.0%, zero points and zero down, yielding a monthly payment of $948.20. Yes, that’s right, as bad as everyone says the economy is today, I can get the same mortgage as I had twelve years ago for about $250 a month less than I was paying 12 years ago in the midst of a “great” economy.

But what about the rise in prices of real estate, you might argue? Good question. So I checked Realtor.com to see what my old house might cost today. While that particular home isn’t currently on the market, another home with the same floorplan and in the same division is listed at $139,000. Plugging that amount into the 6.485% effective annual percentage rate of the mortgage I was offered today and I could buy my old home again today for $1,209.69 a month–about a dollar less than what I was paying for the same home in 1996.

And speaking of useless wackjobs, Georgia used to have Cynthia McKinney and Indiana used to have Julia Carson — as nutty as McKinney ever thought about being, just not as obnoxious. Well, Julia passed away, and her hip-hop thug grandson, Andre, got elected.

He voted against the bailout — and are you ready for the reason? It didn’t have home foreclosure protections. In other words, he wants taxpayers to buy houses and give them away.

Hell, he makes Julia look sane.

Sing for Change chronicles a recent Sunday afternoon, when 22 children, ages 5-12, gathered to sing original songs in the belief that their singing would lift up our communities for the coming election. Light, hope, courage and love shine through these nonvoting children who believe that their very best contribution to the Obama campaign is to sing.

Sing for Change was a confluence of hard work, good will, and shared vision. Inspired by ideas raised at a grassroots Obama fundraiser, a music teacher, Kathy Sawada, and the children composed and rehearsed the songs in less than two weeks. Several musicians heard of the effort and volunteered to accompany the children. Parents and older siblings designed and provided the T-Shirts and the banner. There’s a first for everything, but rarely do so many firsts come together at once: for the children and their parents, this is their first performance, first video, first banner, and first involvement with grassroots work on a presidential campaign.

If you want to watch the Hitler Obama Youth sing to Fearless Leader, you can click the link. It’s way too disturbing to embed here.

I heard about this on Rush, but it turns out, Exurban League thought of exactly the same thing I did.

Others chiming in. Reason: Die Obamajugend Singt! Roger Simon: “Watching this video has disturbed me more than almost anything I have seen in recent years. It is the kind of exploitation of children that reminds me of Young Pioneer Camps I saw when visiting the Soviet Union in the Eighties.”

Heh.

“The sky in the east is red
the sun rises
Maobama rises in America
he brings the sun…”

Another commenter:

Last Sunday I attended a community picnic for “Obama families.”

When we walked into the community center, they tried to shuffle the kids off to one side to “learn about voting” while an aggressive campaign worker told us to sign-in on a clipboard. When I asked why she needed our phone number, address, and email, she said, “we just want to know how many people attended.” Classic Alinsky organizing. My wife spoke Democrat to them and my kids and I were able to enter without further indoctrination.

Inside, a popular children’s entertainer, Rebecca Frezza, was performing but she had changed all of the lyrics of her songs to, I kid you not, “I Love. Bar-ack Oh-Baaaa-mah.” Most disappointing because my daughters are fans and couldn’t hear the songs the way they knew them.

After that were two speeches by our local NJ assemblywoman and an adviser to Obama’s campaign. Both speeches were about how “amazing” Obama’s convention speech was, how the stadium spectacle brought them to tears, and how they were initially inspired to support Obama by Will-I-Am’s youtube video. I couldn’t make this stuff up. Both speeches ended with some hope-and-change chanting. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a room with 200 sweaty Democrats (adults and kids) chanting “yes we can” but I’d rather reenact the torture scene from Syriana than do that again.

I’m happy to report that my daughters, ages eight and five, caught the creepy stench of group-think in the air and were extremely uncomfortable. My Democrat wife too had to admit that it was a little scary. After we left I bought my kids an ice cream cone to sooth the pain.

And another:

O holy Child of Chicago!
Descend to us, we pray;
We’ll suck your toes and kill all those
Who stand in your way.

As sick and twisted as this is, I suppose humor is the only way to deal with it.

Adopting a proposal backed by some House Republicans, he wants to hike the FDIC insurance limits from $100,000 to $250,000, which would, presumably, restore faith in banks while giving small business owners a place to park their cash.

There are just two problems. First, McCain beat him to it.

John McCain
Fox News’ “Fox & Friends”
September 30, 2008

John McCain: “I have talked to the President this morning and recommended an increase from $100,000 to $250,000 FDIC insurance on deposits. I also strongly recommended that we use the exchange stability fund that the Treasury has available — $250 billion — to shore up these institutions. Also, the Treasury has at its disposal about $1 trillion that they could begin without Congressional authority buying up some of these terrible mortgages and help stabilize the situation. So I’ve talked to the President. I know that we have to act. Even though we failed yesterday, even though I went back and was able to get more Republicans on board or help get more Republicans on board, we will go back to this, and I will be engaged always where I think America needs engagement.”

Note that Obama was so shameless he even lifted the amounts. But worse, the House GOP proposed that yesterday, and guess who would have none of it?

The presidential candidates’ support for increasing the FDIC cap is welcome news. Increasing the FDIC cap is a proposal put on the table by Roy Blunt and House Republicans but ruled out by Democrats during the negotiations that led to yesterday’s unsuccessful vote.

So once again, Obama adopts McCain’s ideas.

Sorry, but no, they have not. Where are the economic analyses balancing a bailout against none? I’ll tell you where they are: Nobody has bothered to do any.

Pardon my skepticism, but hysteria tends to do that to me. Let’s see those analyses.

Not everybody is shrieking “the sky is falling!” Here’s law professor Ilya Somin:

Past history shows that stock market drops, even big ones, don’t necessarily cause longterm damage to the economy. Today’s drop in stock values, while the largest in absolute terms, is not even in the top 10 relative to total shareholder value. The 1987 stock market crash was much more severe - a 22.6% loss in share value on the Dow Jones in one day - three times today’s 7% drop. Yet the economy recovered swiftly, in part because policymakers were wise enough to let failing firms go bankrupt and free up their resources for use by more efficient industries.

Like me, Somin is waiting for more analysis. And economists across the political spectrum are signing a petition against a bailout, saying in part the same thing I am.

If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, Americas dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.

For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.

So everybody, take your meds, calm down, and start doing the math.

Oh, speaking of skepticism, Mike Pence had the best line:

“I must tell you, there are those in the public debate who have said that we must act now. The last time I heard that, I was on a used-car lot,” said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana. “The truth is, every time somebody tells you that you’ve got to do the deal right now, it usually means they’re going to get the better part of the deal.”

That’s exactly how I feel. Does anybody else think this is remarkably like all that green nuttiness? Ratify Kyoto and use only one sheet of toilet paper, or we’re all going to DIE! Give us 700 billion dollars now or we’re all going to DIE!

Uh-huh.

It seems imprudent to rush a bailout bill. There have been no committee hearings, and as far as I have been able to tell, very little data. Forbes reported this week that, “’It’s not based on any particular data point,’ a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. ‘We just wanted to choose a really large number.’” This does not encourage me, nor does it make me tend to accept that a disaster is waiting to happen, and the Great Depression will repeat.

I neither accept nor reject the disaster scenario, because no evidence has been given either way, at least in the media. That a certain person does accept it is not evidence: It’s an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy.

I don’t write to encourage you either to accept or deny the scenario, or vote for or against the bailout. I merely ask that you solicit evidence and weigh it carefully before you vote. A bailout could, after all, be as destructive to the economy as none at all.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

They made it up to be sufficiently ginormous to frighten everyone into rapid action.

And it worked.

What’s ironic is that for the last eight years, idiots have been going on TV claiming they’re being silenced (while speaking on TV) and howled about the Bush-Cheney fascist state, and free speech. Except the only fascist tactics and free speech violations have been by the Obama campaign.

Fascinating, that.

Barack Obama played the “me too” game during the Friday debates on September 26 after Senator John McCain mentioned that he was wearing a bracelet with the name of Cpl. Matthew Stanley, a resident of New Hampshire and a soldier that lost his life in Iraq in 2006. Obama said that he too had a bracelet. After fumbling and straining to remember the name, he revealed that his had the name of Sergeant Ryan David Jopek of Merrill, Wisconsin.

Shockingly, however, Madison resident Brian Jopek, the father of Ryan Jopek, the young soldier who tragically lost his life to a roadside bomb in 2006, recently said on a Wisconsin Public Radio show that his family had asked Barack Obama to stop wearing the bracelet with his son’s name on it. Yet Obama continues to do so despite the wishes of the family.

Hope and change?

This is corporate welfare.

The loan package for automakers would reward them with $25 billion in below-market loans, costing taxpayers $7.5 billion to subsidize the retooling of plants and development of technologies to help U.S. carmakers to build cleaner, more fuel efficient cars. Companies would not have to begin repaying the loans for five years, drawing objections from Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who predicted they would return for more help when the money is due.

Then we have this:

I have read Dodd’s proposed statute and in some respects, it is far worse than has been reported. Senator Dodd has placed a loophole in the bill that is explicitly designed to siphon off tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to the Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund even if there are no net profits in the $700 billion venture.

That Housing Trust Fund goes to ACORN. Taxes funding election fraud. ACORN also pressures banks to lend to underqualified applicants. So you see, until we put an end to housing welfare, we’ll have another bailout and another and another and another.

And I’ll give you three guesses which Presidential candidate worked for ACORN, and the first two don’t count. (Hint: He did something that’s like a mayor, but without real responsibilities.)

Shadegg is wondering how much of this is chicken little hysteria.

But I think that in some ways the question doesn’t matter any more. Because Secretary Paulson chose to raise the matter in the way he did — that is, to go public in a very high-profile way, not just with his concern, but with a kind of Chicken-Little, the-sky-is-falling kind of demand — it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That is to say, once the secretary of the Treasury announces to the world that there is a pending financial collapse, perhaps as great as the Great Depression, and Congress must act — he has sent a signal that essentially tells world markets that Congress must act. I will tell you that has been one of the most frustrating things about this since the very beginning…

I can’t tell you how many members of Congress were stunned at that news, and were stunned that none of their local bankers were calling them. And then they called their local bankers, as I called my local bankers, and my local bankers said, “I think things are just fine.” I talked to one banker who said, “Gosh, we’ve got money, and we’re liquid, and we’re making a profit. And we’re in the market selling loans, and we’ve got competitors trying to sell loans against us.”

So, at that point, there’s a disconnect. Secretary Paulson is claiming that this is a catastrophe of generational proportions that could go worldwide. And none of what we were hearing back home matches that. And I’m not speaking just for myself, but also for many of my colleagues who were making similar calls. They weren’t being called by their bankers, or by any of the businesses back home saying, “I can’t borrow any money”…. If, in fact, Paulson had struck a chord with the American banking community, wouldn’t you think that after he announced on Friday that there was a crisis of liquidity that threatens the entire nation’s financial solvency and Americans’ jobs from coast to coast, that my community bankers in Arizona wouldn’t have been picking up the phone by Monday morning, if not over the weekend, to say that “I share the Secretary’s concerns”?

Yesterday, I saw that government-sponsored ads for subprime mortgages — housing welfare — are still running on television.

Then, Biden pulls a John Kerry in Pennsylvania.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania coal country on Thursday, the Democratic vice presidential nominee said the government should steer more money to clean coal — a term used to describe a variety of emerging technologies that burn coal for electricity without producing as much pollution.

“I am for clean coal,” he told The Associated Press following a speech in Wilkes-Barre

That was after he said this:

I don’t think there’s much of a role for clean coal in energy independence, but I do think there’s a significant role for clean coal in the bigger picture of climate change. Clean-coal technology is not the route to go in the United States, because we have other, cleaner alternatives. But I would invest a considerable amount of money in research and development of clean-coal and carbon-sequestration technologies for export.

and this:

“We’re not supporting clean coal,” Biden replied, putting his hands on the woman’s shoulders. “Guess what? China’s building two every week, two dirty coal plants, and it’s polluting the United States. It’s causing people to die.”

I guess he took my advice.

Barack Obama’s campaign is trying to silence the National Rifle Association’s latest ad campaign using strong arm tactics by threatening them with possible legal action if they run the ads

Why the thuggery? Because the NRA is right, and Obama doesn’t want you to know until after election day (hint for Obama: Nobody cares what you have to say about the Second Amendment; it’s your record that counts).

Instapundit has more. Follow the links.

Obama hates the First Amendment as much as he does the Second.

Going very much against the media meme that the current financial crisis is all George W. Bush and the Republicans’ fault, Bill Clinton on Thursday told ABC’s Chris Cuomo that Democrats for years have been “resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac”

Here’s the video.

No matter who wins, we’ll have the ugliest representative in the House.

A $100,000 state grant for a botanic garden in Englewood that then-state Sen. Barack Obama awarded in 2001 to a group headed by a onetime campaign volunteer is now under investigation by the Illinois attorney general amid new questions, prompted by Chicago Sun-Times reports, about whether the money might have been misspent.

The garden was never built. And now state records obtained by the Sun-Times show $65,000 of the grant money went to the wife of Kenny B. Smith, the Obama 2000 congressional campaign volunteer who heads the Chicago Better Housing Association, which was in charge of the project for the blighted South Side neighborhood.

While Obama preens in front of a mirror, McCain is showing leadership.

Democrats had dared Sen. John McCain to show leadership on the Wall Street crisis and he stepped up. He put his campaign on hold Wednesday and challenged Sen. Barack Obama to postpone Friday’s debate, which Democrats had hoped to turn into a forum on failed Republican economic policies.

Less than a month after he canceled the first night of the Republican National Convention, Mr. McCain again flashed his signature maverick style, declaring President Bush’s proposed $700 billion bailout dead and, as he’s done so often in the past, said he could help broker a bipartisan deal to cut through the political clutter…

[ . . . ]

The McCain campaign said last night that Mr. Obama’s refusal would not affect their plans. The Arizona senator announced that he was canceling his political commercials and would return to Washington after a final nonpartisan speech Thursday to the Clinton Global Initiative. He also said he was suspending fundraising, though the link on his Web site for contributions to his campaign compliance fund still worked Wednesday night.

Mr. McCain said top leaders from both parties should meet and hammer out details of a bill that that they would then present to their colleagues as the best solution possible - exactly the way he has crafted deals on other major issues, such as judicial nominees and immigration.

“I am confident that before the markets open on Monday, we can achieve consensus on legislation that will stabilize our financial markets, protect taxpayers and homeowners, and earn the confidence of the American people,” he said. “All we must do to achieve this is temporarily set politics aside, and I am committed to doing so.”

Or as a correspondent put it, Obama has gone from “voting present to voting not present.”