Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) I'm going to depart briefly from the usual format of this post to talk about a story in-depth. A bit.

Much has been made about Obama's about-face on campaign financing. For one thing, it is the final spike in the coffin of his image as a "politician for change," since he was adamant early on about accepting financing and the limits that go along with it. For another, it's pretty cheesy to do it this early in the game.

That said, I can certainly support his position for a reason I've not seen discussed much in the news.

See, Obama isn't just running against John McCain and the media is painting this as Obama beating up on McCain with his superior fund raising. While true, it is also true that Obama recognizes that he will be running against every stinking 527 group that can be tossed in front of him, and those organizations are under no preset spending limits. He cannot rely on MoveOn.org to fund every rebuttal quickly enough and so needs to have his own money and his own war room in place (courtesy the Clintons, my suspicion is).

It is sad that a major party candidate has to stoop to bending his "principles" (quotes, because we don't really know that he has any) for the good of the nation, but there you have it. I have no problem with this.

2) Is anybody surprised by this? In a recent poll across the globe, only Kim Jong Il was a more despised national leader than Robert Mugabe, with Bush a close third!

3) The European Union, a grand idea whose time really had come, has begun collapsing once more. First the Irish rejected the Constitution and now it looks like the Czech Republic is getting cold feet.

4) The EU was positioning itself to be America's greatest economic competitor and to stave off the threat of China as the world's largest economy, which will happen within the next twenty years.

5) As my good friend Blogenfreude is fond of saying, "No one could hae expected this!" Combine a town featured in a popular major motion picture (The Perfect Storm, and yes I resist the temptation to use that here) with the recent rash of featured celebrity pregnancy and add in a dose of Dumbya's "abstinence only" education, and this is what one might expect.

6) They are at it again. We must put a stop to this.

7) Iowa, Missouri, Illinois: all Obama enclaves. I wonder how many of these people have repudiated their guns and their God to keep in with the elitist spiritual tone of the good Senator's campaign?

8) Ice = water = life. We've found it.

9) Compared to WHO, her sister????

10) A personal note: I'm sad to see such a shoddy paean to a great television show has been made, despite my admiration for the cast. This becomes a personal note, because as a child, I counted among my friends Mel's three children, and Barbara Feldon's son. In fact, we always believed that Mel would eavesdrop on us at play to crib ideas for the movies and TV shows he was involved in.