Obama’s Potential

I loved this Byron York anecdote from South Carolina:

I went to Barack Obama’s rally here, on Sunday night, with a Republican friend who had never seen the Illinois senator in action before. Watching the crowd of more than 3,000 fill up the convention center, watching the people send up waves of energy to Obama, and watching him play off that energy in a speech that was one of the best political performances anyone has seen this year, my Republican friend said, simply, "Oh, shit." He recalled the scene from Jaws, in which the small seaside town’s sheriff realizes how big the shark he’s tracking truly is, and says, "We’re gonna need a bigger boat."

Why is something so obvious to Republicans not clear (yet) to Democrats?

Reverse Von Hoffmann Award Nominee

Check the definition here. The nomination goes to RIch Lowry, yesterday morning:

"It can’t be long before the Clinton team uses Obama’s relationship with a shady Chicago developer named Tony Rezko to try to make him seem as if he’s running the most corrupt political operation since, well, the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign."

And last night:

"I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago."

Limbaugh Loses It

The internecine war in the Republican party if McCain wins the nomination will be brutal to watch. The photo-image is taken from Rush’s own site:

Those of us who are opposing these McCain… Let me set this up a better way.  When Huckabee was coming out of nowhere in Iowa, we had numerous pundits on the left who write 01125109par89380imagefile their conservatism to be read by liberals, jumping on the Huckabee bandwagon. And then McCain came out of nowhere in New Hampshire, and then they jumped on the McCain bandwagon.  Romney wins in Michigan, and they didn’t jump on the Romney bandwagon. They stayed on the McCain bandwagon.  Then we go to Wyoming, and Romney won all the delegates there, and they didn’t jump on the Romney bandwagon. They stayed on the McCain bandwagon and hoped for Huckabee.  And then we get to South Carolina and Nevada.  In Nevada, Romney cleans up, and nobody talks about it.  "Romney is nowhere. He’s off the charts. He should quit.  Thompson should quit. He should get out of the race!" They remain on the McCain bandwagon.  Now the people on the McCain bandwagon are telling those of us who aren’t on the McCain bandwagon, to shut up. Just be quiet. We are supposedly damaging the Republican Party.

We are supposedly damaging the conservative movement. We should just shut up.  Just sit by and watch all this stuff and let it happen and just be quiet.  What is the point?

Hewitt and Limbaugh face off against Kristol and Brooks. And they say the Democratic race is getting nasty.

The Fed Panics?

I’m not an economist but this emergency .75 cut in interest rates strikes me as a really panicky move. Either that, or Bernanke knows stuff we don’t. We haven’t had any sort of downturn for a very long time; we’ve jumped from one bubble to another; and the Fed’s view is that we need to be cushioned from any further effects from the global market and US imbalances? I repeat: I’m not an economist, just a lay person with some basic knowledge of the economy. But the Fed just made me a lot more concerned about the economic future, not less.