Free Republic

This is the season of high political anxiety. After months in the lead, Sen. Barack Obama has slipped back in the polls to dead even with the Republican ticket of Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. As we enter the season of highest political advice, here's my advice to the Democrats: Dumb it down. I don't need to give that advice to the Republicans. They've been dumbing it down for years. That's why they keep winning.

Speaking with evident condescension, Arizona Sen. John McCain needled Barack Obama on Wednesday by offering to travel to Iraq with the Illinois senator to help him gain a better understanding of the war and the consequences of withdrawing troops. The attack by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was in line with his campaign's recent attempts to portray Obama as too young and inexperienced to lead the nation. Speaking before a boisterous crowd of 500 who gathered for a town-hall-style meeting here, McCain accused his Democratic rival of ignoring the successes of the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq and suggested that...

Barak Obama has now explained why small-town, penny-ante peckerwoods like moi utter vicious anti-trade and anti-immigrant rhetoric. He also explains why we like playing around with guns, bibles and other things Barack thinks are too dangerous to allow in public without arrogant, liberal supervision. He took a fund-raising junket to San Francisco and figured it would be safe to let the hemline of his Trotskyite slip show. While amongst the condescending, self-selected elite by the bay, he had the following to say about small town America. “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion...

Barack Obama showed his deft political touch today, and demonstrated his keen insight into the lives of the little people in this country, with a speech that is sure to be worth at least thirty points in Pennsylvania in the upcoming primary: You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade...

Sen. Hillary Clinton did it again! The former first-lady-turned-presidental-hopeful broke out in a singsong Southern twang before a black audience -- this time in NYC!. Clinton was addressing the National Action Network, a civil rights group founded by Rev. Al Sharpton, on Friday.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu9TQq0C3Ac

RUSH: In Chicago we've been following the "living-wage" argument and the Big Box Resolution, trying to keep Wal-Mart stores out of the city. (story) "The so-called 'living-wage' ordinance that would have required mega-retailers here to pay their workers higher wages was successfully turned back Wednesday as supporters on the City Council could not muster enough votes to override Mayor Richard Daley's veto. Daley, who vetoed the ordinance this week saying it would cost the city jobs and hurt people who need those jobs the most, was able to convince enough aldermen who voted in favor of the ordinance in July...

http://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=2088#more-2088

I am a conservative metrosexual. As most people know, a metrosexual is a heterosexual man who has good taste in art and music, and likes to pamper himself with nice clothes and expensive grooming. There's only one drawback: I can't stand much of the so-called common-man culture celebrated by the Right. I fully realized I'm a conservative metrosexual -- let's call me a metrocon for short -- a few weeks ago. The Gretchen Wilson song "Redneck Woman" came on the radio. This tune, a hard-charging boogie-woogie number, is a celebration of crude behavior, a kind of red-state aria of defiance...

A Supreme Court nomination may not have been the ideal time for Laura Bush to start acting like "Buy One, Get One Free" Hillary Clinton. At least President Clinton only allowed his wife to choose the attorney general. (Remember the good old days when first ladies only got to pick the poet laureate and the White House china pattern?) Between cooking segments on the "Today" show this week, Laura rolled out the straw man – sorry, "straw person" – argument that the criticism of Miers was rooted in "sexism" (which is such a chick thing to say). I'm a gyno-American,...

Republican gubernatorial candidate Jerry W. Kilgore says Democratic candidate Timothy M. Kaine is making fun of his rich drawl in a radio ad running across Virginia. Mr. Kaine, who is lieutenant governor, notes in the ad that Mr. Kilgore, the former attorney general, did not use his own voice on his own ad. "If I have something to say, I'm not afraid to say it myself," Mr. Kaine says in the ad. "But Jerry Kilgore has been making things up about me and letting slick radio announcers do his dirty work." The Kilgore campaign said they think the ad is...

Yipes! Looks like this whole America-healing thing has been a bit slower than earlier anticipated. We here at Iowahawk are all about keeping hope alive, so here's fresh batch of positives to keep our progressive friends warm during the upcoming Rovian ice age: On an up note, Democratic efforts to increase voter turnout was a major success story in 2004. Progressives have shown that they know how to get first-timers and young people to the polling booth. Next time, you can work on the problem of making them vote for you. Kerry's lack of success in the South was largely...

We now know of at least one undecided voter who decided to vote for Bush after the debate. Robin Dahle, who asked President Bush the first question yesterday, was just on NPR's Weekend America. Dahle is on about 3:40 into the audio (courtesy of KUOW.) Dahle said that, before the debate, there was a 40 percent chance he'd vote for President Bush. He's now 80-90 percent sure of his vote, although not 100 percent. The reason he gave was that Bush was more "personable." He also said that Kerry blundered when he said that only 3 people in the room...

Susan Lampert Smith, a columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, was sprawled on her couch in Mount Horeb on Sunday afternoon, like so many others in her state, watching the Green Bay Packers and looking forward to a nap. Suddenly, as she tells it, the phone rang and her friend Mary was on the line. "John Kerry's at the Main Street Pub watching the Packers," Mary told her. "I just thought she was pulling my leg," Smith told E&P Monday. Smith had written a column for that day's State Journal challenging the pointy-headed Kerry to visit a small-town...

NASHVILLE (Billboard) - Country comedy is currently a hot commodity, spawning strong-selling CDs and DVDs and receiving plenty of TV exposure. Among the genre's stars are Jeff Foxworthy (news), Bill Engvall (news), Rodney Carrington, Ron White, Larry the Cable Guy, Cledus T. Judd (news) and T. Bubba Bechtol. The burgeoning popularity of the country comedy genre is succinctly explained by J.P. Williams, head of Parallel Entertainment. The management company handles Foxworthy, Engvall, Larry the Cable Guy and White. "To a large degree, everything in comedy skews to hip-hop, urban and Hispanic," Williams says. "But between Los Angeles and New York...

John Kerry can already wow an audience with ‘Ring of Fire.’ Now a group of industry leaders is trying to convince Southern country music fans to support the senator in November. How does John Kerry plan to capture the hearts and minds of the so-called Nascar Democrats, those relatively conservative, rural Southern whites who tend to vote Republican? There's choosing an appealing running mate, of course. But there are some party insiders who think a liberal Yankee could take another route: country music. The Music Row Democrats (MRD) aim to do just that. Founded earlier this year in Nashville by...

awrence F. Kaplan argues that, despite the political elite's growing intolerance of casualties in Iraq, the public remains steadfast in its support of the operation, including a willingness to incur a significant number of American fatalities ("Willpower," September 8 & 15). In his words, there is an "absence of a correlation between casualties and public support." Well, not quite. Kaplan reaches this conclusion based on both a superficial reading of some of the academic literature as well as a blanket acceptance of conclusions derived from problematic social science (e.g., the research of Gelpi/Feaver and Kull/Ramsay). A more discerning review would...

<p>DALLAS -- In dealing with minorities, liberals have learned to try to keep a lid on their condescension. But sometimes it slips out.</p> <p>It slipped out a few months ago when Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Lieberman, during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," took the liberty of crediting affirmative action for putting the highly capable Condoleezza Rice -- the first African-American woman to serve as national security adviser -- "where she is today."</p>