Cacciaguida

2008-11-21T12:55:00.002-05:00

In a break from politics, here's a link about screenwriting, and really about storywriting in general: some remarks by Robert McKee. Story is research, not riverside-strolling inspiration. I like the cut of this guy's jib. And as to television outpacing movies in the story department -- well, just consider Lost and Fringe!

2008-11-20T13:58:00.003-05:00

Well, Janet Napolitano is being appointed something, and something much more worrisome than dogcatcher. Does anybody care? Gerard, you're a Pennsylvanian -- why not write to Arlen, ask him what memories he has of this woman from '91, and whether he's cool with her having control of the Homeland Security apparatus....

2008-11-19T21:50:00.000-05:00

Cardinal Stafford, speaking at CUA:

"On Nov. 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake,” continued the cardinal. He pointed out that president-elect Barack Obama campaigned on an “extremist anti-life platform,” and described him as “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.”

2008-11-19T11:27:00.000-05:00

Sneeze Causes Massachusetts Driver to Lose Control of Car, Plunge Into River. Gesundheit.

2008-11-18T20:49:00.002-05:00

The Obama cabinet -- NRO's Jim Geraghty (apparently a frequent quotee on this blog; can't say if that will continue or not; no, I'm not Jim Geraghy) says:

All That Hard Work By Liberals This Year Is Finally Paying Off
So Joe Lieberman is keeping his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee on the say so of 42 Senate Democrats AND President Obama; his Secretary of State might be Iraq War supporter and preconditionless-summit opponent Hillary Clinton; no one will be prosecuted for waterboarding, Bush's guy John Brennan may take over at CIA and Bush's man Robert Gates may stay on as Defense Secretary.

I don't know how the liberals feel, but so far the Obama administration rocks.

Well, "rocks" is relative, but I'll say this: so far, it's shaping up as a conventional Democratic administration, not as "DailyKos Goes To Washington." And the DailyKos people know it (they're enraged, inter alia, that Joe Lieberman has not, not, been deprived of his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee).

And, Eric Holder as AG: very well, he's a respected career prosecutor and former Deputy AG. His one gaffe was that he didn't look hard enough at the Marc Rich pardon file at the end of the Clinton administration. The Rich pardon was disgusting, but it was Bill Clinton's fault, not Holder's.

Obama had been looking at Janet Napolitano for AG. If she had been chosen, I would hope -- hope -- it would have been World War Three-and-a-Half from conservatives, because Janet Napolitano was one of Anita Hill's attorneys during the Thomas hearings. It should be a priority to make sure neither she nor anyone else from that crew is ever appointed dogcatcher. I have all their names.

2008-11-12T17:23:00.002-05:00

So McCain is a gentleman. I didn't really doubt it, but it was good that he stepped up to the plate on Leno last night.

Asked by Leno about griping about Palin from unidentified McCain operatives in the days following the election, the Arizona senator said, "These things happen in campaigns.

"I think I have at least a thousand, quote, top advisers," he scoffed. "A top adviser said? I've never even heard of ... a top adviser or high-ranking Republican official."

This was the "straight talk" that Bill McGurn, writing in yesterday's Journal, rightly said that McCain "owed" Palin. Last week's anti-Palin leaking from unnamed "McCain staffers" had the unmistakable smell of campaign bottom-feeders trying to find their place in the circular firing squad before they rot altogether. Wrote McGurn:

The unmistakable message here has nothing to do with Africa, the North American Free Trade Agreement or bathrobes. It is the campaign team's cry, "It's not our fault. How could we ever win with this woman on the ticket?"
The first point to make here is the most obvious: This is the language of losers.....

We are asked to believe that Mrs. Palin was not ready for a national campaign. On what evidence from any part of this election are we to conclude that anyone on the McCain campaign team was ready for a national campaign?

2008-11-11T14:32:00.002-05:00

Latin and Black Voters Instrumental to the Success of Proposition 8

But since for many on the left, Teh Black and Teh Gay serve as co-symbols of political angelism, this can't be allowed to be true; hence some interesting contortions, e.g. at SocialistWorker.org.

2008-11-05T19:27:00.004-05:00

Jim Geraghy has a nice post on Palin's future at NRO. Question: should she go for a Senate seat or not? I'd have said yes -- gravitas, national exposure, all that -- but Geraghty says no: too many opportunities to make enemies and alienate constituencies, too many chances to "vote for it before you vote against it."

Besides, even though we've just come through an election in which both major parties nominated sitting U.S. Senators, and several Allen Drury novels notwithstanding, sliding directly from the Senate into the Presidency is very rare. It's been done precisely twice: Harding, and JFK. We usually choose our Presidents from among sitting and former governors.

Another good Geraghty point: the lady's 44! That's about 19 in politician-years! (Old enough to be qualified, but only just!) Why should she be bruited about for 2012? Give her time to mature into the leader she has shown she can be.

2008-11-05T14:42:00.001-05:00

U.S. bishops investigating Church grants for ACORN

2008-11-05T11:44:00.001-05:00

California: Prop. 8 passes, overturning same-sex marriage

2008-11-03T20:20:00.002-05:00

* Will Obama turn out to have gained or lost votes by giving the generous-to-the-loser victory speech the day before the election?

* While The Economist, always hip to irrelevant trends in American politics, has a chin-scratcher on the "Obamacons" this week (did you know that Susan Eisenhower is a "big name" for conservatives? Neither did I. Did you know that Susan Eisenhower existed? Neither did I), Iowahawk has the last word on them here.

* Well, all things considered, the smell of cooked goose is in the air, but I'll be busy tomorrow trying to uncook it, so I cannot, repeat, cannot promise to blog the vote.

2008-11-01T14:53:00.002-04:00

Some good news, and a sobering reflection

Pollster John Zogby:

Is McCain making a move? The three-day average holds steady, but McCain outpolled Obama today, 48% to 47%. He is beginning to cut into Obama's lead among independents, is now leading among blue collar voters, has strengthened his lead among investors and among men, and is walloping Obama among NASCAR voters. Joe the Plumber may get his license after all.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Pennsylvania:

Gov. Ed Rendell urged supporters of Sen. Barack Obama on Friday to get out the vote in the last 100 hours of the presidential campaign because the race for Pennsylvania is closer than polls suggest.

"This is not a 10-, 12- or 14-point election for Barack Obama," the Democratic governor said Friday afternoon in the lobby of East Stroudsburg University's new Science and Technology Center. "A lot can happen in that last weekend."

While most polls show the Democrat Obama leading his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain, by 7 to 14 points in the state, a recent NBC/Mason-Dixon poll forecast a mere 4-point difference.

"The enthusiasm gap has narrowed," he said....

Look, I need to add this about last-minute poll-narrowings. They happen a lot (Ford in '76, Gore in '00, and Kerry in '04). Almost always, the candidate who was behind but whose numbers were improving at the end loses anyway. And then his supporters wander around bumping into trees and saying, "If the election had been one week later...!"

Dummkopf!! If the election had been one week later, your last-minute surge would have been one week later too! It was almost certainly a voter response to the approaching deadline, not some exogenous variable caused by dawning recognition of your candidate's intrinsic wonderfulness! Get a grip and start planning for the next election cycle!

That said, it is nice to read the above news, and to see a few pundits talking about the electorate's Obama "buyer's remorse," e.g. this one, and also Republican insider Ed Rogers in The Washington Post (subscriber access only).

Rogers also talks about how voters resent the media telling them "it's over" and that they have no further choice to make. In that regard, consider Doonesbury's latest.

2008-10-31T16:35:00.002-04:00

John Podhoretz: Ten Reasons Why McCain Might Win

Plus two that John didn't get:

1. McCain does best with "retail" campaigning: diner to diner, front porch to front porch. That's one of the ways he revived his moribund campaign for the nomination. Even his rallies (and I attended one) have since late September had the heart-to-heart feel of true retail campaigning, rather than the rah-rah-kick-their-butts feel of more conventional campaigning. (He has Palin for that, and she does it very well!)

2. McCain has always done best in a comeback situation, as he did in the primaries. I said months ago that he'd be hopeless in the general election unless he had a good solid poll-deficit in mid-October. And he certainly did.

2008-10-29T23:04:00.004-04:00

The Phillies just won the World Series. The last time they did that was in 1980. A few days later, Ronald Reagan was elected President, despite a widespread superstition that a National League victory in the Series always portends a Democrat victory in the election.

I'm just saying.

(And congratulations, Gerald E.!)

2008-10-25T23:34:00.003-04:00

Christ the King

Tomorrow, Oct. 25, is the Feast of Christ the King in the Extraordinary Form calendar (last Sunday of October). This feast will occur in the Ordinary Form calendar on Nov. 23 (last Sunday of Ordinary Time).

I don't know what if anything Canon Law says on this point, but, lacking such knowledge, my opinion is that those with access to each form of the Western Rite can celebrate this feast twice each year, and I intend to. Once before, and once after, the presidential election, to show that, in the final analysis -- presidents, temporal kings, other secular pooh-bahs, on s'en moque, quoi?

2008-10-25T23:10:00.001-04:00

Mark Steyn on Obama on-line fundraising and "Mr Fake Donor" of "23 Fraudulent Lane":

The gentleman who started the ball rolling made four donations under the names "John Galt", "Saddam Hussein", "Osama bin Laden", and "William Ayers", all using the same credit card number. He wrote this morning to say that all four donations have been charged to his card and the money has now left his account. Again, it's worth pointing out: in order to enable the most basic card fraud of all - multiple names using a single credit card number - the Obama campaign had to manually disable all the default security checks provided by their merchant processor.
The reader adds:

Last night on Sheppard Smith’s 3pm-ET show this issue was brought up briefly and they cited the Obama campaign falsely claiming that this sort of thing happens at the McCain site and that they catch these errors later in the processing. Well, it took three days to process my donations and they all skated through their rigorous screening.

And it doesn't happen at the McCain site. This reader tried donating under "John Galt" and "Saddam Hussein" to the McCain campaign and they rejected it.

Powerline comments: "Of course, in the world we live in, our reporters are too busy covering Sarah Palin's shoes and hair stylist to have time to notice that Barack Obama's entire campaign may be based on a foundation of criminal fraud."

2008-10-24T16:05:00.002-04:00

Pollster who was closest to right in 2004 says 2008 is now a 1.1% spread

New Republic blogger tremulously sketches how Obama could lose, even without a "catastrophic external event."

2008-10-23T14:56:00.002-04:00

Voice mail. Our university is significantly upgrading its voice-mail system, which will give me occasion to review my "greeting." Tell me what you think of these alternatives.

"You have reached the office Il Professore Cavaliere Cacciaguida....

1. "....I am currently in a secret meeting with the Jesuits to Counter the Reformation. If you are calling to seek my intercession with the Inquisition on behalf of a family member, you know perfectly well that can't be done. If you have any other message, please leave it after the tone."

2." ....Thanks to our new system, which allows me to check voice-mail messages on the Web, a chance now exists that I will retrieve your message. On the other hand, if you were someone I wanted to talk to, you would know to send me an e-mail message instead of calling, or you would have my cell phone number. So all I can say is, at the tone, give it a whirl and we'll see what happens."

2008-10-19T19:02:00.001-04:00

Latest RealClearPolitics poll average is Obama +5, down from Obama +7 a few days ago and on the edge of the margin of error. What the...?

2008-10-15T23:17:00.002-04:00

Predictions:

It will come down to some 500-or-so disputed ACORN-registered voters in Ohio (or PA, VA, FL, CO, NM, WI, or MO, but most likely OH).

The Republicans will file the first lawsuit (it was the Dems who did so in 2000).

The election will be in litigation through Thanksgiving at least.

It's anyone's guess whether the Supreme Court will once again consider the statutory electoral vote counting deadline of Dec. 12 to be significant. (There is grounds for hoping that the litigation does not go beyond the courts of the forum state, no matter how biased it may be. I know nothing about the present condition of the Ohio S.Ct.)

Very possibly McCain will emerge the winner because the disputed voters were blatantly ineligible, but he will take office with all the prestige editorial pages declaring this yet another illegitimate Supreme Court coup, and civil disorder on the verge of following on financial disorder, perhaps reigniting it. Merry Christmas and Happy Hannukah.

2008-10-15T23:10:00.002-04:00

I did not watch the final debate. I was actually at a jolly lawyers' dinner talking about lawyer stuff, almost entirely unrelated to the election, and it was really fun.

Consider the comment boxes to be "Open mike Whateverday," esp about the election and the final debate. But if you've got something you've been wanting to get off your chest about the nature of the universe, by all means....

2008-10-15T15:16:00.003-04:00

A must-read on polling from NRO. Conclusion: the deficit is 4-5 points, not the 12-14 found by some pollster and widely splayed across front pages. Find out why one political scientist thinks the pollsters with the big spreads are misleading the public.

2008-10-14T21:57:00.003-04:00

Writing in The New York Post, Amir Taheri quotes Jesse Jackson as saying of an Obama presidency:

The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where "decades of putting Israel's interests first" would end.
Jackson believes that, although "Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades" remain strong, they'll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.

So, Obama gets the paleocon vote -- but is New York now in play? :)

2008-10-11T14:54:00.003-04:00

"Troopergate" report: piffle, says Powerline.

Powerline has also been tracking evidence of Obama's membership in something called the New Party, whose manifesto places it several turns of the crank to the left of even today's Democratic Party.

2008-10-11T14:36:00.001-04:00

Babar!!