How many houses does McCain own? None

I suspected that this was the actual answer when the story first made headlines.  The McCains have a pre-nuptial agreement that separates their finances.  The “homes”, as Barack Obama and his campaign put it, are mostly investment properties in Cindy McCain’s trust.  Since John McCain has no involvement in his wife’s business affairs, he would have little knowledge of the assets in her portfolio.

Of course, a couple of these aren’t investment properties.  Cindy bought a condo for their daughter, for instance, and she purchased another in La Jolla for an elderly aunt whom she supports.  The McCains live primarily in a 6600-square-foot condo in Phoenix and a three-bedroom condo in Arlington when Congress is in session.  They also have a Sedona ranch that again is part of Cindy’s portfolio.

No doubt, McCain’s clumsy answer gave Obama room to poke fun at him as rich and out of touch at the same time.  However, McCain himself doesn’t own any property and isn’t “rich”, and Cindy and her family earned their money honestly.  They certainly didn’t partner with a now-convicted political fixer to buy a house in a tony neighborhood.

Anyone who thinks the media have been balanced and unbiased during this election season simply hasn't been paying attention. 

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Barack Obama has benefited from adoring coverage, a lack of journalistic rigor and a sizable advantage in media coverage. In short, everything in the media seems to break his direction.

Large portions of the American public already recognize this. According to a recent study by Rasmussen Reports, 50% of independent voters and even 27% of Democrats believe that the media are trying to help Obama win. Just 12% of independents say the media are helping John McCain.

It comes as little surprise, then, that according to a recent study by Pew Research, 48% of those surveyed — and 51% of political independents — say they have heard "too much" about Obama. 

The excuse for this imbalance is that people need to get to know Obama. But the media coverage has been fawning and superficial.

Consider the case of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose hate-filled "sermons" have been all over the Internet. Wright presided over Obama's wedding, and was his pastor for 20 years.  

The mainstream media largely ignored this story until they were forced to cover it because of the attention it was receiving on talk radio and the Internet. Had McCain been "mentored" by a racist pastor spewing hate, the media would most certainly have covered it with vigor.

Or consider Obama's association with Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, members of the notorious Weather Underground. Ayers bombed the Pentagon during the turbulent '60s and is unrepentant about his terrorist past.

Obama launched his political career at the Ayers' home and served as chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation Bill Ayers founded. But major media have been almost completely uninterested in the story.

Imagine if John McCain had a similar relationship with a right-wing militia leader who had bombed a federal building.

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Rather than bully, browbeat and brainwash, the group would be of better service if it tried to determine why so many Americans have bought into the global warming nonsense. But then, falling for hip fads is likely just human nature, especially in rich nations that can afford such indulgences.

Instead, the group should ask itself why it accepts the extreme-green position so unquestioningly. What do members have to gain by claiming that "we face a severe environmental crisis," as Vakoch says, when that demonstrably is not the case. The world, particularly Western developed nations, is cleaner than it was 40 years ago.

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In other words, thanks to the government takeover precipitated by Schumer’s big mouth, those who were paying their loans on time get screwed — and those who were on the brink of foreclosure get rewarded.

Message: Stop being so damned conscientious and start defaulting now!

The DNC’s anti-Semitism

Addendum: Defenders of the DNC could say, “Well, hey, all of these are just quotes from newspapers like The Hill and the Picayune” — which would be true.  The DNC, however, just managed to pick five quotes that contain five references to Cantor and/or Abramoff’s religion?  Let’s imagine the response that would erupt on the Left if the RNC did the same thing to Obama.  Even Bill Clinton’s single reference to Jesse Jackson’s win in South Carolina got him branded as a race-card player — and that didn’t involve tying Obama to a criminal on the basis of his skin color.

Heck, we don’t have to imagine this at all.  Remember all the cries of “racism” when the subject of Jeremiah Wright finally aired?

Obama: We should probably stop setting examples for Russian aggression

Link via Karl, who wonders what Obama could possibly mean here after his stirring testament at Saddleback to what a “real bad person” Saddam Hussein was.

The Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq war, which his comment clearly referenced, is well known. But this was the first time the Democratic presidential candidate has made a comparison between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s recent military activity in Georgia.

“We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.”

Here’s a newsflash, champ: Russia’s foreign minister did indeed invoke a case of U.S. military action in his Journal op-ed the other day, but it wasn’t Bush and the Middle East that he had in mind. I don’t begrudge the guy his leftist cant, but at least put some meat on the bone. How, precisely, would Russian actions have been different if we hadn’t invaded Iraq? Georgia and Ossetia have been fighting
since Obama was in his 20s. Are we playing another game of Time Machine here, in which the war somehow becomes a justification even for misfortunes that preceded it?

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Obama supporters might excuse the candidate's support from communists, Marxists and socialists, saying he is the only alternative since these groups would never support the Republican nominee. (Which is entirely correct and indicative of the Democratic Party's continuing decline into the pit of democratic socialism.)

But the truth is, these groups usually reserve their endorsements and support for fringe candidates, not someone from a major party. That's not the case this time around. They seem to have their man.

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In the years since the Fairness Doctrine was scrapped, America's elite media establishment, which had thought its comfortable position of power was permanent, has been rocked by a free speech revolution courtesy of talk radio and a whole universe of bloggers. Their instant fact checks and counterpunches have dethroned the Big Three TV networks, as well as the New York Times and Washington Post.

The noises we now hear from Democrats in Congress about legislatively reinstating the Fairness Doctrine are really cries of defeat. As much as they've tried, liberals have found it impossible to compete with conservatives on talk radio. So they want to rig the game in their favor by forcing stations under law to accept liberal content no matter bad the ratings are.

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Wind and solar are also undependable. On windless and cloudy days they are useless and require conventional power sources as backup. Output isn't steady and can't be increased on demand. You can't make the sun shine brighter or the wind blow harder during peak periods.

If money could be made on these alternatives, companies would be rushing to pursue, uh, windfall profits and wouldn't need any subsidies. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported recently: "In 1999, 2001 and 2003, when Congress temporarily killed the credits, the number of new turbines dropped dramatically."

If wind power is such an opportunity, why don't gazillionaires like Pickens just start building wind farms? Why the drive for taxpayer subsidies while Democrats suppress other energy sources such as offshore oil, shale oil and nuclear power?

Wind provides only 1% of our electricity compared with 49% for coal, 22% for natural gas, 19% for nuclear power and 7% for hydroelectric. To replace natural gas' 22% with wind would require building 300,000 1.5-megawatt turbines occupying an area the size of South Carolina. Ask the Nimbys where they want them.

Obama channels UN’s Egeland in sneering at American charity

This makes sense if people count only that charity taken by threat of force by the government.  Even then, the notion made no sense; the US sent a massive Navy presence to the islands devastated by the tsunamis to ensure the proper distribution of relief, at no small cost to our nation and military during a period when we were fighting two wars.  Even apart from that, Americans raised over $2 billion privately for tsunami relief, more than doubling the $900 million spent by the US government.

In fact, no country even came close to our efforts in tsunami relief.  Germany and Australia gave $1.3 billion, the UK almost $800 million, Canada $780 million, Japan $500 million, and France gave $300 million.

In Spain, the government studied this question and found that the US more than doubled any Western nation in per-capita donations (in Euros):

COUNTRY…………….PER CAP. GIVING

Spain……………………..122
Belgium……………………120
U.K……………………….117
Netherlands………………..110
Ireland……………………100
France……………………..74
Finland…………………….70
Austria…………………….50
Germany…………………….39
Hungary…………………….32
Slovakia……………………25
Czech Republic………………25
Romania……………………..5

U.S……………………….278

So the notion that Americans somehow come up short on charitable giving is simply a myth.  Moreover, it’s a myth with a purpose.  The people who float this nonsense want to take more out in taxes so that the elites who run the government make the decisions on how the money gets spent, and not the people who originally earn the money.

Once again, we see Obama give a knee-jerk Blame America First response without knowing the facts.  Americans give mightily, as a normal condition and especially in times of crisis.  Does Obama think he can win the votes of Americans by slandering them?

Crisis: Russia digs in within Georgia, threatens response to Poland “beyond diplomacy”; Update: Russia freezes ties with NATO?

They’ve already built one checkpoint 30 miles outside Tbilisi, according to the AP, and are working on three more in west-central Georgia. Curiously enough, the sob story (and ultimatum) issued this morning by Russian FM Sergey Lavrov didn’t mention anything about a sustained occupation. As for the screaming red-fonted banner on Drudge warning of a reaction “beyond diplomacy” to the new U.S.-Poland missile deal, the article itself is excruciatingly vague — but Condi Rice’s reply was not. Taunting the bear:

Such comments “border on the bizarre frankly,” Rice said, speaking to reporters traveling with her in Warsaw.

“When you threaten Poland, you perhaps forget that it is not 1988,” Rice said. “It’s 2008 and the United States has a … firm treaty guarantee to defend Poland’s territory as if it was the territory of the United States. So it’s probably not wise to throw these threats around.”…

Speaking to reporters traveling with her, Rice said, “the Russians are losing their credibility.”

For good measure, NATO’s secretary general sneered that the threats are “pathetic rhetoric.” How smart is it to mock a country that’s jonesing on military victory and already proven it’s willing to spit on a ceasefire it agreed to just days ago? The U.S. and EU seem awfully confident that Russia’s not going to escalate this any further, with Bush insisting this afternoon that Ossetia and Abkhazia are part of Georgia and that western powers will work together to ensure the country’s integrity. The only problem: Russia’s already called an emergency meeting of the Duma for Monday to decide whether to formally recognize the provinces as independent, even though, as the Telegraph notes, they’ve agreed to a raft of UN resolutions over the past 10 years recognizing that the two are part of Georgia. What’s the west’s plan if its bluff is called? Notes WaPo, drily, “Bush did not specify what, if anything, the United States and its allies would do to uphold Georgian sovereignty…”

I have no answers, but find myself wondering how long it’ll be before ambassadors start getting recalled and what a week-long “3 a.m. moment” will do to Obama’s message during the Democratic convention. Exit question: How likely is it that the two provinces, occupied and encircled by Russian troops, will “vote” for independence instead of annexation by Moscow?

Obama’s support for infanticide breaks into mainstream media

Lieberman as VP: Disaster

Lieberman’s endorsement did not win John McCain the primary, either.  His friendship with McCain probably hurt him among Republicans as much as it helped among independents voting in GOP primaries.  It certainly lent some heft to the RINO charge, especially since Lieberman’s liberal record is very plain to see.  By the time the official endorsement came on February 3rd, McCain had already won more primaries than his rivals (New Hampshire, South Carolina) and held a slim lead in delegates over Mitt Romney.

The addition of Joe Lieberman will not convince independents that McCain is a maverick; it will convince an already-skeptical GOP base that McCain is a RINO.  Patrick knows better than most how essential enthusiasm is to the GOTV efforts and fundraising.  McCain appears to have finally generated some of that enthusiasm, and picking Lieberman would snuff it out for good.  Republicans respect Lieberman, but they don’t want a liberal Democrat as the person who would succeed to the Presidency if something happened to McCain — which is the entire point of the Vice Presidency.