Another Nigerian email scam... wait a minute!

A big hat tip to the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler for providing the world with this little ditty. Do you think you can help out this poor Paulson fellow?

Dear Sirs,

Please do not be alarmed at the way I am contacting you, and I trust God you will see your way to assisting me.

I am Mr. Henry Paulson, and I currently serve as Secretary of Treasury in a North American country, the US of A. I am due to be receiving the sum of USD700 billion (seven hundred billions), only the money seems to be held up. I got your name from the girl who runs the computer. This is where I need your help.

As soon as you can, God willing, I will need you to give me the number of your American account where I can wire this sum. For your trouble, as part of the settlement, I will give you the sum of exactly nothing.

Please be well, and I trust in God you will assist me honestly and without delay.

Yours, truly,

Mr. Henry Paulson
USA Secretary of Treasure

That's just frickin' hilarious right there!

Good Day to You, Sir

Arrrrr! Those Iranian landlubbers gave me the scurvy!

Pirates - with AK-47s and Rocket-propelled grenades - have been quite a menace lately off the horn of Africa. Just the other day, some hapless Somali pirates incurred the wrath of the U.S. and Russian navies after they hijacked a Ukranian ship full of guns, ammo, and a few T-72 tanks. Now there is another story making the rounds that reminds us all that its hard out there for a pirate.

Another group of hapless Somali pirates hijacked a cargo ship - this one from Iran. Within days after the hijacking and several attempts to get a peek at the cargo - which was generically labeled as "minerals" and "industrial products" - some of the pirates began to get burns on their bodies, they became violently ill, and their hair began to fall out. Hmmm; me thinks that the "minerals" on board this Iranian ship could very well be the kind that cause a geiger counter to go wild.

Serves the pirates right, but at the same time, what the hell is Iran up to?

Good Day to You, Sir

Something to ponder about the "racist" issue

More and more, we are hearing from the lefties that if Barack Obama loses the presidential election, it will be on account of racism.

In fact, just this Friday, columnist Deborah Douglas of the Chicago Sun-Times penned a charming piece entitled Blame deep-seated racism if Obama loses. In her column, Douglas castigates those nasty right-wingers and Republicans for unloading on her boy, Barack. Ooops, am I allowed to use "boy" in this context?

There is just one blaring problem with Douglas' foolish logic: Republicans and other people on the right wouldn't vote for Barack Obama if he were the whitest white guy from the planet Whitey, because his race is not an issue; his politics however, most certainly are. So if it is not the conservative/Republican vote that will sink Obama, then who is it that is not going to vote for Barack Obama? Certain white DEMOCRATS, that's who! You don't think the party of slavery and Jim Crow is going to leave its roots behind that easily do you? And Ms. Douglas, I'm not through with you yet. In your screed against racism, you forgot one other important nugget, and that is the 95%+ of black Americans who are going to vote for Barack Obama; in many cases, solely because of the fact that he is black. Is it not just as racist to vote for someone based on the color of his skin, as opposed to voting against him for the same reason?

You shouldn't be too surprised at this opinion of Deborah Douglas. This is the same woman who, in another column from earlier this year, said this about Obama's racist and America-hating church formerly headed by Jeremiah Wright:

To [Christoper] Hitchens and others who would misinterpret the basic and authentic Christian message of Trinity, I say back off. You don't know who you're messing with. You're denigrating the best of black America. You're criticizing God-fearing folk who value education and put their money and time where their mouths are in ministering to the community. These so-called critics are the same types who castigate black people for failing to address problems that plague the community, including education, HIV/AIDS and financial responsibility.

You mean that "basic and authentic Christian message" that HIV/AIDS was spread among black people by the U.S. government? That one? You know, if we are going to be branded as racists no matter what we do, then we might as well go ahead and do the right thing, which is vote against Barack Obama. I am still having trouble bringing myself to utter the words, "Vote for John McCain," but I have little trouble urging you to vote against his opponent.

Good Day to You, Sir

How do I love thee?

In an interview with FrontPageMagazine, author and college history professor Larry Schweikart - who co-wrote one of my favorite books of all time, A Patriot's History of the United States - provides a wonderful analogy about the America-hating, America-bashing left-wingers out there who claim to be patriotic and that "we love this country too!" Being married and all, this analogy made perfect sense to me:

During the hot period of the Iraq “war” (really, a theater in a war) debate, I used to challenge people who said they “loved their country” but opposed the war putting support for the nation in the context of a marriage. A man says he loves his wife but . . . he won’t wear any symbols attaching him to her (a ring, or in the case of patriotism, a flag pin, or fly a flag at his house, or wear a sticker on a car); he says he loves his wife but . . . in public all he does is point out her flaws and note how much the Europeans don’t like her; he says he loves her, but associates with other women (nations) that routinely bash her. And on and on. Any woman in her right mind would say, “You don’t love me.” So it is with patriotism. When people don’t act like patriots, I do question their patriotism.

The biggest problem people make is to to confuse love of country with love of government. I don't like our current government at all, especially one that wants to spend almost a trillion dollars bailing out a bunch of quasi-governmental mortgage lenders whose dirty dealing trickled down to the rest of the financial market. However, I love this country: our ideals, our heroes who have done their best to live up to those ideals, the hard-working, peace-loving, self-sufficient people of this country who just want to live their lives, do the right thing, and be left the hell alone. That is what I love about America, and that is exactly what too many of these so-called left-wing, fellow "patriots" actually hate about this country. They hate the national anthem, they hate the flag; they burn it, step on it, and literally defecate on it. But they love our country, and whatever you do, don't you DARE question their patriotism! Hmpf!

Good Day to You, Sir

A sign of the times

I drove past an Arco gas station on my way to pick up the kids from preschool, and I noticed that the price for regular unleaded was $3.56/gallon. That is the cheapest I have seen it anywhere around here since the high of $4.47 back in July.

I picked up the kids and took them home. About an hour later, I made a quick check of Drudge just to see what was going on in the world, and I saw a news item about the price of a barrel of oil closing at $16 higher than it did yesterday. With that in mind, I piled the kids back into the car and went back to that Arco station to top off my 1/4 full tank before the prices begin to presumably spiral back up within the next couple of days.

It's so funny that once upon a time, I really didn't give the price of gas a second thought. For years, it hovered in the low to mid $1 range, and that was all there was to it. Now, I check the price of a barrel of oil in the same fashion that I check the weather to see what the temperature will be today: Whoa! It's going to be 96 degrees today; I'd better wear a short-sleeve shirt. Whoa! A barrel of oil dropped below $100 yesterday; I'd better go fill the tank.

Sigh.

Good Day to You, Sir

False syllogisms of the left

Bookworm Room, a blog that I should have added to my roll a long time ago, has an excellent post on the screwy logic about war and religion that our friends on the left just can't seem to shake. This argument is then applied to the left's vilification of Sarah Palin simply because she is religious.

Give it a look-see.

Good Day to You, Sir

Heads I win, tails you lose

Correct me if I have this wrong: If a company, especially a multi-billion dollar financial institution, is experiencing success, then the company's executives, its employees, and its stockholders get to share in that success. Now, if the company is performing badly, then you would expect that these same executives, employees, and stockholders must also share in the misery... right?

That brings us to the events of the last few weeks in which our federal government, with our hard-earned tax dollars, has spent billions of dollars bailing out Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and now American International Group (AIG). This is a huge deal, folks.

A couple things bother me about all this, not the least of which is inflation. I'm no financial expert, but from what I gather, the Federal Reserve simply printed/created the $85 billion that they used to bail out AIG. That's 85 billion more dollars that have flooded our money system but are, of course, not backed by anything of value, meaning the value of the dollar just went down by an equivalent amount to what was just flooded into the economy. Fannie and Freddie on the other hand were simply handed money that was taken out of my monthly check, so that was just a straight up transfer of wealth. How quaint.

What also bothers me is of course what I alluded to earlier, and that is the fact that I don't see any of the wealth created by these companies when they are experiencing good times, but they certainly see my wealth when they fall on hard times. And how exactly does the government pick and choose who gets bailed out and who doesn't? When does it stop?

If you read the Constitution, you will see that these bailouts never should have started in the first place. I just checked Article I Section 8 (powers of Congress), and I didn't see anything in there about handing over the tax money of American citizens to some business that has fallen on hard times, or even worse, has fallen on hard times due to gross mismanagement or corruption... I'm talking to you Fannie and Freddie!

The beauty of our country's free-market economic system (as it should operate) is that we all have the power to succeed. But the system only works properly if we also have the power to fail. Once government takes the "fail" part out of the equation, then we no longer have a free-market system; instead we have socialism. Under socialism, we lose the power to succeed, and misery is shared by everyone.

Good Day to You, Sir

The gift that keeps on giving

I just got another juicy comment from someone who is not happy about my postings regarding Titus Hill, the wannabe gangsta-thug from Florida who killed his robbery victim, Sean Ellenberger, but not before being fatally shot himself by said victim.

I originally wrote about the incident here, and I posted some profane comments that I later received here.

Two days ago, I got another comment - this time from... well, K-BO refers to himself as Hill's brother. But in thug-ghetto speak, I don't know if he literally means Hill was his actual brother, or if he was just a good friend, i.e. "Wassup my brutha?"

So once again, someone is not happy about hearing the reality of the situation, and what is really delicious is that K-BO blames all this on the victim, Sean Ellenberger! Check it out, and as always, I haven't edited a thing:

Man Fuck all yall. I been knowing titus my whole life. He was my brother. Yall don't know shit about Him. Yall dont know what our family is going through without him. He was the life of our family and now that he is gone we are all having trouble moving on without him. and before you speak on the situation you need to get the facts right. titus didnt shoot first. that fuck ass white man shot my brother first as he was walking away. FUCK SEAN AND THE REST OF YOU DUMB FUCKERS!!!!!!!! RIP BLLOD BROTHA WE MISS YOU LOVE YA FACE!!

Ah yes, isn't that great? Hear that everyone? I don't have my facts right: Titus didn't shoot first! I mean, yeah, he only held a gun to a man's head while robbing him, but he didn't shoot first! I can't imagine why the victim... excuse me... "that fuck ass white man" pulled his own gun and fired. How dare he?!

What do we do when society has sunk this low? When K-BO saves his anger not for his "brother" who robbed and killed a man, but for the robbery victim who defended himself and his friend? What do you do with knuckleheads like K-BO? At least I know what someone did with a knucklehead like Titus Hill.

Good Day to You, Sir

Big Brutha is watching you

I found this image on Drudge.

To people like these two ladies in the photo, Obama is not just a man, he is a cult of personality. It is truly disturbing to witness the irrational adoration that some people have for their Obamessiah. As more and more lefties and Democrats begin to experience buyer's remorse about their chosen candidate, the true believers who still hang on to Obama become even more scary.

Good Day to You, Sir

First she was a pig, now Palin is a pedophile

Popular left-wing radio host Randi Rhodes lost her job at leftist radio network Air America last spring for referring to Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro as "fucking whores". Let's see how long she keeps her current job after saying on the air that Sarah Palin should not be trusted around teenage boys:



The left is getting more and more vile as their Obamessiah spirals downward. Pretty pathetic.

Good Day to You, Sir

Sheesh, FDR didn't even stand to greet you

Of course, that's because he was in a wheelchair. And Bob Dole doesn't even know you're supposed to use your right hand when shaking hands with someone. Of course, that is because he lost the use of his right arm after it was torn apart by German machine gun fire in World War II. Before I go further, watch this Obama-approved campaign ad:



In case you can't view YouTube videos, the ad stressed how "out of touch" McCain is by including the fact that McCain doesn't even know how to use email or a computer. Of course, the reason would be that McCain's POW torture injuries prevent him from using a keyboard, so he doesn't exactly get behind a computer all that much. Needless to say, the Obama campaign has stepped in it once again.

If Obama wants to make the inability to send email an issue regarding one's qualification to be president, perhaps he would be mortified to know about Bill Clinton's White House email experiences: there were precisely two of them. Of the 40 million emails sent by the Clinton administration during his 8 years in office, Bill Clinton personally sent only two. Here is your CNN source for that one. The first email was simply a test email to see if Clinton could figure out how to send one in the first place. The second email was sent to John Glenn when he went back into space in 1998.

That's not all; McCain isn't necessarily the computer klutz that Obama tries to paint him as being. It didn't take long for me to find a 2000 article in Republican-unfriendly Slate e-zine, by Republican-unfriendly writer Jacob Weisberg, which, aside from mentioning McCain's injuries, included the following:

Six months ago, no one would have pegged McCain as the most cybersavvy of this year's crop of candidates. At 63, he is the oldest of the bunch and because of his war injuries, he is limited in his ability to wield a keyboard. But McCain's job as chairman of the Senate commerce committee forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him.

If I was able to find that article on Google in about two minutes of searching, why weren't Obama's staffers able to do the same? Keep at it, Barack! You're doing great!

Good Day to You, Sir

Tell me again what a "community organizer" does?

Byron York of National Review unlocks the mystery in this informative article. It runs rather long, so I will help you cut to the chase:

Perhaps the simplest way to describe community organizing is to say it is the practice of identifying a specific aggrieved population, say unemployed steelworkers, or itinerant fruit-pickers, or residents of a particularly bad neighborhood, and agitating them until they become so upset about their condition that they take collective action to put pressure on local, state, or federal officials to fix the problem, often by giving the affected group money. Organizers like to call that “direct action.”

So it's a way of egging people into demanding government goodies at the expense of the taxpayer. Nice. With a socialist like Obama, were you at all surprised? And who is the Godfather and Patron Saint of community organizers?

Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be “an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions.” Once such hostilities were “whipped up to a fighting pitch,” Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising....

Just what we need in order to bring "hope" and "change" and to heal the divisions in our country!

Good Day to You, Sir

Brother, can you spare $5 to $25?

Did you know that Barack Obama's favorite Bible quote, which appears in one of his two autohagiographies, is "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me."?

Jesus said that, but apparently, those are just mere words to the other Messiah, Barack Obama. You might have heard about Barack Obama's half-brother, George. Twenty-six year-old George lives in a 6x10 foot hut in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. If Barack Obama ever got a job as a brother's keeper, he would have been fired by now, because George is still living in that hut. Meanwhile, while Barack apparently hasn't sent a dime, hasn't "given back" to someone more unfortunate than himself - namely, his own half-brother - he wants you, the American taxpayer, to fork over an estimated $800 billion dollars to the continent of Africa. Like a typical Socialist, he won't spend any of his money on causes in which he believes, but he will be more than happy to spend yours.

So, since Barack Obama has dropped the ball on assisting his own flesh and blood, a conservative writer has decided to pick up the ball and run with it. Dinesh D'Souza has ponied up $1,000 of his own money to start the George Obama Compassion Fund. D'Souza is asking readers at Townhall.com to send donations of between $5 and $25 in order to add to this fund. The money is especially geared toward getting George the job training he needs to become a mechanic, which is his life's ambition.

If you are interested in doing what Barack Obama refuses to do, you can send a check made out to George Obama to this address:

George Obama Compassion Fund
P.O. Box 3384
Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067

The best part is that when he collects all the funds, D'Souza will offer the money to the Obama Campaign with the explicit requirement that the money be sent to George. Charity begins at home, but when that fails, it falls on others to voluntarily make up the difference. That is true compassion.

Good Day to You, Sir

Getting the gun debate out in the open

Did you know that in many states - even ones with draconian gun laws - you can carry a gun out in public? The catch is that you must carry it openly.

Even here in very anti-gun California, you can carry an openly holstered handgun in public as long as it is unloaded; you can carry the ammo magazines in your pocket opposite from the holster. I have never had the stones to try this little maneuver, because I am sure the devil is in the details: there are probably local ordinances that supersede the state law, or rules in private establishments, which wouldn't worry me as much - so you get kicked out of the mall... so what?

However, read the story of Mark Marchiafava, who carried his pistol in a holster in the town of Gonzales, Louisiana. The cops arrested him for it, and then....

Good Day to You, Sir

That about sums it up

Say what you will about Pat Buchanan, but he breaks this down quite nicely:

Why did the selection of Sarah Palin cause a suspension of all standards and a near riot among a media that have been so in the tank for Barack even "Saturday Night Live" has satirized the infatuation?

Because she is one of us – and he is one of them.

Barack and Michelle are affirmative action, Princeton, Columbia, Harvard Law. She is public schools and Idaho State. Barack was a Saul Alinsky social worker who rustled up food stamps. Sarah Palin kills her own food.

Michelle has a $300,000-a-year sinecure doing PR for a Chicago hospital. Todd Palin is a union steelworker who augments his income working vacations on the North Slope. Sarah has always been proud to be an American. Michelle was never proud of America – until Barack started winning.

Barack has zero experience as an executive. Sarah ran her own fishing fleet, was mayor for six years and runs the largest state in the union. She belongs to a mainstream Christian church. Barack was, for 15 years, a parishioner at Trinity United and had his daughters baptized by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons are saturated in black power, anti-white racism and anti-Americanism.

Sarah is a rebel. Obama has been a go-along, get-along cog in the Daley Machine. She is Middle America. Barack, behind closed doors in San Francisco, mocked Middle Americans as folks left behind by the global economy who cling bitterly to their Bibles, bigotries and guns.

Barack has zero foreign policy experience. Palin runs a state that is home to anti-missile, missile and air defense bases facing the Far East, commands the Alaska National Guard and has a soldier-son heading for Iraq.

Barack, says the National Journal, has the most left-wing voting record in the Senate, besting Socialist Bernie Sanders. Palin's stances read as though they were lifted from Reagan's 1980 "no pale pastels" platform. And this is what this media firestorm is all about.

In this whole "experience" game, the Dems don't even pretend that Obama possesses anything near what John McCain does, so the media go after Palin's neophyte status instead. That's a pretty risky maneuver when Obama is at the top of the Democrat ticket.

Why won't the "achievement gap" go away?

We just got our API scores from last spring's state testing, and although our school had an overall gain of 3 points, many of our sub-groups - including black students - didn't attain the goals. Much handwringing goes on around the country and in our state about the so-called "achievement gap" that exists between white and Asian students on the one hand, and black and Hispanic students on the other. In the end, the comparisons are narrowed down to black vs. white, as many things tend to be in this country.

I continue to be amused at the education wonks who just can't seem to figure out why such an "achievement gap" exists. I am still not sure if they truly don't know, or if they really do and are just afraid to acknowledge the logical reasons for fear of being called a racist. For me, it is not hard to find examples of why black students continue to underpeform in school. I watch the process with my own eyes, and I then I also read accounts from other sources. One such source includes a book I am currently reading called And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City Students. The book was written by L.A. Times reporter Miles Corwin, and though it was released in 1997, not much if anything has changed in that 11 years. The achievement gap existed back then too. Here is a passage from the book (pp. 198-199) that speaks bucketloads toward explaining the chronic underperformance of black students:

When Curt was in elementary school, [his mother] Yvonne demanded that he do his homework in the kitchen, right next to her, while she completed her medical paperwork (she was a chiropractor). Every night when Curt had finished, she inspected his homework, to make sure it met her standards. Curt was never allowed to use street slang in the house, and if he ever spoke in a manner that his mother did not consider "proper English," she corrected him. She refused to allow him to wear baggy or hip hop clothes.

So you see some of the things that have made this student successful, such as dogged parental involvement and high behavior standards at home and at school. Now look what threatened to drag Curt down, and notice that it got worse during Middle School (naturally):

Curt has been classified by the school district as "highly gifted," and in the predominately black elemenatry school he attended, he was enrolled in several gifted classes. But in mainstream courses, he constantly was harassed by the other students. They did not like his precise manner of speaking, his preppy clothes, the way he would volunteer answers in class. he was called a "punk" and a "fag." He was accused of "acting white." In class he was teased constantly. In the schoolyard, he was goaded into fights.

"Curt would get interested in a subject and during lunch he would read the encyclopedia," Yvonne recalls. "But he'd have to do it on the sly, hide what he was doing. He was afraid someone would see him and begin teasing him again. He was so confused. It's very tough for a young black male who wants to be a scholar. Curt wanted to be a scholar, but he didn't want to deal with kids telling him he was selling out his race. That's a heavy load for a child to deal with."

During junior high school, Curt finally succumbed to the peer pressure. He wanted to fit in, so he stopped raising his hand in class, stopped striving for As. His mother could see that his enthusiasm for learning was ebbing....

Curt went on to find out about the gifted student program at Crenshaw High School in south-central Los Angeles, and found his niche there among other hard-working and studious pupils where he could flex his academic muscles without fear of being marginalized by his fellow students.

The above passage is not the only instance in the book that this atmosphere of anti-intellectualism is aired; Corwin talks about it in the book's introduction on page 4:

At many inner-city schools, the peer pressure to fail is oppressive. Students who are articulate, who excel in class, are accused of "acting white," of "selling out." Many of the students I write about have endured this type of hazing in the school lunchroom, at the bus stops, in their neighborhoods, on the playgrounds....

God Almighty! Please explain to me how black students are ever going to improve their academic progress when to do so means to be ostracized and accused of betraying their race... by their own peers no less? Can you think of a social system that is more perverted than one where trying to do well in school is looked down upon and discouraged? Can you imagine a philosophy more diabolically twisted than one that believes that striving to do well in school is seen as not being "black"? The Ku Klux Klan could not be more proud of the blacks in this country who are perpetuating this belief.

Meanwhile, pointy-headed academics and education wonks sit around and wonder why too many black students aren't doing well in school, and many activists and pundits insist that the entire "acting white" phenomenon, where studious and/or articulate black students are tormented by their peers for "selling out", is a myth.

Good Day to You, Sir

And now a word from Mrs. Chanman

I realize you don't hear from me very often, but after seeing a headline on Drudge earlier today, I felt compelled to give my two cents.

It seems that US Weekly has chosen their candidate for the presidential election. Mr. Chanman has been trying to convince me of the overt left-leaning bias in the media for almost 9 years. Sometimes I have agreed, other times, I have chalked it up to what I call the Chanman Family Conspiracy Theory. This time, I definitely agree.

US Weekly and I have shared some of the best experiences of my life. While you might think that sounds strange; it's definitely true. Most trips I have taken on an airplane have started with a stop at the airport gift shop to pick up some 'mindless, I'm on a vacation' reading material, almost always including US Weekly. I can remember being pregnant with little Chanman #1 and coming home from work dead-tired, reclining in the glider in his nursery, US Weekly in hand. It's my way of decompressing.

I know that much of what I have read in that magazine is trash, but it's an easy way to take my mind away. What is frustrating is that while I know it's trash, mostly untrue, and definitely exaggerated, there are millions of people who rely on US Weekly for their news. And what will they think when they read US Weekly's latest issue?? That's right: Sarah Palin's life is full of Babies, Lies, and Scandal. Nonsense, I say.

Last Friday morning when it was announced that Governor Sarah Palin was going to be John McCain's running mate, I can't remember a time when I have felt so excited about the future of our country. I am one who can easily be caught up in "it's history in the making", "no matter who wins this election, it's great for our country," etc. However, this time, it's more than that. Sarah Palin is strong, confident, not afraid to stand up for what she believes in, and furthermore, she puts her money where her mouth is. She walks the talk. I actually got tingles up and down my spine just a few minutes ago while I was watching her speech at the Republican Convention. Sarah Palin makes me proud to be an American!

It sickens me to see that cover of US Weekly. What a negative, pro-Democrat spin they have put on the cover of their magazine. I don't even want to know what the article inside says.

I think another exciting moment in my life is just around the corner...say maybe the first Tuesday in November when John McCain and Sarah Palin are voted into office. This will be one special occasion that I can assure you I will NOT be spending with US Weekly. In fact, I can promise you I will NEVER purchase or read that magazine again.

Good day to you, sir (and madam!).

Politicians have to get their start somewhere

I have noticed that the Democrats, and particularly the Obama campaign, seem to be overly obsessed with Sarah Palin's starting job in politics. Before she became governor of the state of Alaska, she was the mayor of Wasilla, a small town in that state.

Literally minutes after McCain announced that Palin was his running mate, Obama campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, had this to say about Sarah Palin:

Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency.

The key word in that statement is "former." She may have been the mayor of Wasilla, population 9,000, but she is now the governor of Alaska, population 685,000. Compared to many other states, that isn't a lot of people either, but keep in mind that in 2004, Democrats seriously flirted with making the governor of Vermont (pop. 620,000) their standard bearer. You know, Ronald Reagan was the former president of the Screen Actors Guild, but he moved on from there. The Democrats' beloved Jimmy Carter started out on various school and library boards before serving as a Georgia state senator, but he moved on from there.

Then, just yesterday, Barack Obama himself played up this unfair distortion during a CNN interview:

My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We've got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – we have a budget of about three times that just for the month.

Uh, yeah... Senator Obama, once again, I guess someone must remind you and your campaign that Sarah Palin is not the mayor of Wasilla anymore; she is the governor of one of our 50 states... that's 50 states, Senator; not 57. I am willing to bet that even a sparsely populated state like Alaska has more than 2,500 employees and more than $36 million for a monthly operating budget. If you do the math, that works out to around $432 million that the Obama campaign works with on a yearly basis. Meanwhile, government expenditures in the state of Alaska for FY2007 were $5.5 billion. None of this money could be spent without the signature of the governor. That would be Sarah Palin. If Obama really wants to compare budgets and expenditures, then he should be honest and refer to the entire state of Alaska, and not just the town of Wasilla. Palin is past that gig.

I am having a ball watching the Obama campaign tying itself into knots trying to deal with this curveball that McCain has thrown their way.

Good Day to You, Sir