Keeping It Classy, As Only The Lefties Can...

Rachael Lucas is having a great time this weekend:

This is the most fun I’ve had on the internet since Al Gore invented it. Holiday weekends are usually the slowest but this one is like a turbo bullet train and I’m totally enchanted and mesmerized. Not even so much about Palin herself as the reaction to her on both sides, such as the right’s giant collective woody and the left’s giant collective fetal-position thumb-sucking crying-itself-to-sleep heartache. How’s the left dealing with everything? With pure solid-gold class, that’s how.

Don't miss the rest of it – it only gets better, and there's even a surprise ending: she's leaving Rupert for her new love...

Freedom of the Press in Russia...

It's gotten to the point where you pretty much expect any dissenting Russian journalist to be killed. The more entrenched Putin has become as Russia's chief thugocrat, the lower the life expectancy of any Russian journalist who doesn't toe the Putin line.

This most recent case is from Ingushetia, which is near Georgia and South Ossetia. Excerpted from the Wall Street Journal:

Police arrested and shot to death Sunday the head of an Internet news service who had been critical of authorities in the volatile Caucasus province of Ingushetia.

...

Authorities in Moscow issued a statement confirming Mr. Yevloyev was shot in the head while in police custody Sunday in an "incident" that is under investigation. Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin didn't elaborate, saying a check to clarify the circumstances of Mr. Yevloyev's death had begun. The committee is under the Russian Prosecutor General's office.

Mr. Yevloyev had been a vociferous critic of Ingushetia's governor, a former security-service agent who has been backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Mr. Yevloyev had charged that regional and federal agents were brutalizing the locals, and kidnapping and assassinating political enemies. In June, a judge ordered him to close down his site on charges of spreading "extremist" statements, but it lately reappeared under a different name.

Mr. Yevloyev had been in Moscow on business during the weekend and was arrested Sunday morning as he stepped off a plane that landed in Nazran, the capital of Ingushetia. He was whisked away in an armored jeep of Russia's Interior Ministry and dumped a short time later near a local hospital with a single bullet wound through the head, said a friend, Mogamed Khazbiyev, who had gone to the airport to meet him.

...

Mr. Yevloyev was the latest in a series of Russian journalists to have died in suspicious circumstances. The death of Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot in October 2006 at her Moscow apartment, highlighted the dangers faced by Russia's independent press. Ms. Politkovskaya was a lead reporter at Novaya Gazeta, a Moscow-based newspaper that specializes in muckraking and probes of government corruption. She was the third journalist at the paper to die under mysterious circumstances. Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was shot on a Moscow street in July 2004.

...

I've traveled extensively in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of the time I felt completely safe, though at times I was worried about petty thieves (and actually had an expensive camera lens stolen). I would not feel safe today...

How tragic this is for the ordinary Russian citizen. Their country had its chance to take the same course as other former Soviet states, to prosperity and personal freedom. Instead the thugs have taken over, ordinary folks are suffering, lifespans are declining, income is declining, population is declining, and this sort of brutality is now...expected.

Palin and Obama: a Brit's View...

Gerard Baker is the U.S. Editor, and the Assistant Editor, of the Times of London. He's got a piece up today at Real Clear Politics called Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama, focusing on the differences between the two. It's fascinating to see how this foreigner (albeit, one who is very familiar with the U.S.) views the two. Here's his conclusion:

Now it's true there are other crucial differences. Sen Obama has appeared on Meet The Press every other week for the last four years. He has been the subject of hundreds of adoring articles in papers and newsweeklies and TV shows and has written two Emmy-award winning books.

Gov Palin has never appeared on Meet the Press, never been on the cover of Newsweek. She presumably feels that, as a mother of five children married to a snowmobile champion, who also happens to be the first woman and the youngest person ever to be elected governor of her state, she has not really done enough yet to merit an autobiography.

Then again, I'm willing to bet that if she had authored The Grapes of Wrath, sung like Edith Piaf and composed La Traviata , she still wouldn't have won an Emmy.

Fortunately, it will be up to the American people and not their self-appointed leaders in Hollywood and New York to determine who really has the better experience to be president.

Go read the whole thing.

Success in Anbar...

Smells like success to me:

Today in Iraq, responsibility for security in Anbar Province was transferred to Iraqi civilian authorities. Iraqi forces will now take the lead in security operations in Anbar, with American troops moving into an overwatch role. Not long ago, Anbar was one of the most dangerous provinces in Iraq. Al Qaeda was in control of almost every major population center, and its leaders intended to turn Anbar province into a safe haven from which to plan and launch further attacks against Iraqis and others in the region, as well as here at home.

Today, Anbar is no longer lost to al Qaeda - it is al Qaeda that lost Anbar. Iraqis - like countless other Muslims across the world - witnessed al Qaeda's brutality first-hand and rejected it. As a result, Anbar has been transformed and reclaimed by the Iraqi people. This achievement is a credit to the courage of our troops, the Iraqi Security Forces, and the brave tribes and other civilians from Anbar who worked alongside them.

Today's ceremony returns the 11th of 18 provinces to provincial Iraqi control. Al Qaeda and Iranian-backed Special Groups remain a threat, but the United States and the nations of Multi-National Forces-Iraq continue to stand with the Iraqis as they work to defeat these enemies and build a democracy in the heart of the Middle East. The success of Iraq will make the American people more secure and help yield the peace we all desire.

President Bush's statement today, lauding the Anbar handover.

Handovers like this (though perhaps not as significant, admittedly) have been occuring on a near-daily basis in Iraq for the past couple of months. The lamestream media's response is predictable, but very disappointing nonetheless. Their rules seem to be:

American casualties, rumors of quagmires, real or imagined atrocities, accusations by our enemies: front-page news, naturally.

American success in Iraq: not so much – ignore it or bury it.

And they keep bleating about their declining readership or viewership. You'd think that after getting bludgeoned over the head enough times with the facts, they'd wise up and start more balanced coverage of the news. There are even a few success stories out there to guide them: the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and USA Today, all of which are doing well.

But instead we see precipitous declines in the numbers for nearly all major news outlets. The New York Times numbers are falling at a rate that must be terrifying its Board of Directors. Ditto the Los Angeles Times. Right here in San Diego, the Union-Tribute (known locally as the “Union-Buffoon”) is in disaster territory, announcing multiple waves of layoffs within the past year and publicly putting themselves up for sale – and no interested buyers have appeared yet.

In any industry I'm familiar with, the Board of Directors of each such company would long ago have taken some concrete action to staunch the bleeding. When I see nearly an entire industry headed into the toilet like this, with no mystery whatsoever about the solution to their financial woes, I can only think of one explanation: liberal ideologues must hold majorities on those Boards. They are deliberately making bad business choices in order to keep pumping out the liberal viewpoints, talking points, and narratives. How sad for all those shareholders...

If you think I'm spouting stuff and nonsense, consider talk radio. There are a few liberal talk radio shows, not a single one of which is making much money. There are hundreds of conservative and libertarian talk radio shows, many of which are making good money, and some of which are raking in the big bucks (think Limbaugh). Do you think it's an accident that more people want to listen to conservative viewpoints? Given how few television or print news outlets have a neutral perspective (much less a conservative perspective), doesn't it strike you as significant that they are the only such outlets that are growing and profitable?

Obama's National Service Plan...

The One's web site is not lacking in documentation of Obama's promises, proposals, and plans. One of these is his National Service Plan, documented in this fact sheet (PDF). You really can only understand the magnificent liberal insanity of it by reading the whole thing, but here are some things from it that jumped out at me:

• “In November, Barack Obama laid out a comprehensive plan to provide all Americans with a world-class education and give our schools a substantial infusion of funds to support teachers and principals and improve student learning. That plan conditions that assistance on school districts developing programs to engage students in service opportunities. Obama believes that middle and high school students should be expected to engage in community service for 50 hours annually during the school year or summer months.”
  
  Translation: He's going to send a lot more federal dollars to local schools, if they require every kid to “volunteer” 50 hours a week of community service. Of course, just like every other federal school funding program that's conditioned on the schools toeing the line, the vast majority of school districts will leap on this. So our kids will be headed off to a week or two of slave labor every year. This is a wonderful peek into the liberal mindset: if some group of people don't want to do what you want them to do, then force them!
  
  
• “In recent years, social entrepreneurs have been the catalyst for much social innovation in education, economic development, health and the environment. By developing innovative solutions to important social issues, social entrepreneurs provide many of the important services that address human needs, improve our quality of life, and make democracy work better.”
  
  Translation: “social entrepreneur” is lefty-speak for what the rest of us would call a government-paid meddler. Unlike real entrepreneurs, “social entrepreneurs” don't earn a profit by providing things that people want. Instead, “social entrepreneurs” take your money (through taxes) and shove things you don't want down your throat. Not my idea of a good time...or progress.
  
  
• “Barack Obama’s national service plan will cost about $3.5 billion per year when it is fully implemented. He will maintain fiscal responsibility and prevent any increase in the deficit by offsetting cuts and revenue sources in other parts of the government. This plan will be paid for in part by cancelling tax provisions that would otherwise help multinational corporations pay less in U.S. taxes starting in 2008 by reallocating tax deductions for interest expenses between income earned in the U.S. and income earned abroad. The rest of the plan will be funded using a small portion of the savings associated with ending the war in Iraq.”
  
  Translation: Total bullshit! This is my favorite part of the entire document – the final paragraph. It's titled A Commitment to Fiscal Responsibility – and what a load of crap that is.
  
  The BS starts right at the beginning, with the notion that all the programs described in this paper could be funded for $3.5 billion per year. A more level-headed estimate would be in the range of $15 billion per year, and that's making the wholly unwarranted assumption that government spending would be done efficiently.
  
  The tax provisions he's talking about canceling were those enacted to bring U.S. tax practice into line with international practice. These provisions were intended to keep U.S.-based multinational corporations in the U.S. – and they're working. Basically what these provisions do is stop our former practice of double-taxing multi-national corporations – so that if a company is taxed on money it made in (say) France, the U.S. would not require the company to pay U.S. income tax on that money in addition to the French tax. This is how the tax code works in most of the world. Before we implemented these provisions, U.S.-based multinational corporations were picking up and moving overseas – because in many cases they would save millions or even billions by doing so. Obama could only raise money this way for a few years, because after that those companies will all be located somewhere else...
  
  And then there's that last bit of double-speak about using “savings” from ending the war in Iraq. The war in Iraq is being funded (like any war) through a series of “extraordinary” (meaning outside the budget) funding resolutions. Obama is proposing that after the war is over, we'll simply add the amount of those outside-the-budget funding resolutions to the budget, to fund this National Service Plan. Somehow in the twisted liberal world view, that constitutes “savings.” You just can't make this stuff up...

Sarah Palin Mashup...

The photos in this video slide show reinforce my impression from reading about Sarah Palin and her family: they truly seem to be people imbued with traditional American ideals, experiences, and accomplishments, thrust into a political world full of very different animals. They seem to have an ordinary American's common sense; they've faced the same kinds of problems we all have. They are not only a family full of people I can identify with; they are people I can admire.

In the other three top-of-the-ticket candidates we have an Ivy-league elitist with a suspicious background (especially ties to the Chicago political machine and to unapologetic American radical terrorists), a genuine American war hero of towering ego and questionable intellect, and a traditional glad-handing, plastic-smiling politician with a runaway mouth and little actual achievement. None of these are people I can easily identify with. None of these are people I admire, or aspire to be like. None of these are people I'd hang with.

Sarah and Todd Palin? It's easy to imagine having them over for dinner...

Sarah Palin Reactions...

From three of my favorite blogs: Protein Wisdom, The Anchoress, and Villanous Company. All three are well worth reading; the first is full of links that take you to all sorts of information...

Solar Irradiance vs. Climate...

Some scientists advocate the notion that small changes in solar irradiance (basically the brightness of the sun) make a major contribution to the changes in the Earth's climate, most especially the average temperature. I've seen bits and pieces of their work before, and while there are some very suggestive correllations, I haven't seen much in the way of plausible mechanisms explored.

Still, the apparent fact that solar irradiance is well-correllated with average global temperatures is very suggestive. I think we can be fairly certain that climate changes on Earth do not cause the sun to get brighter or dimmer. It's at least plausible on the face of it that changes in solar brightness do cause temperature changes on Earth. And it seems highly unlikely that a correllation like this could be a coincidence:
There's much more where this came from, in a very readable seven-page report available here (PDF). The discussion on the current solar cycle is particularly interesting...

Democrats Support Drilling!

Palin and Bullwinkle...

Politics of Personal Destruction...

The Clintons famously accused Republicans of engaging in the “politics of personal destruction” when accusations about Bill's dalliances emerged. Of course, the real masters of such politics are the Clintons themselves – most notoriously for the way they dealt with the “bimbo eruptions” that plagued the Clinton presidency.

Some lefties are now carrying on the tradition with a vile attack on Sarah Palin. They're accusing her of faking her last pregnancy to cover for the “fact” that her daughter (Bristol) was pregnant. The accusation is based entirely on amateur evaluation of carefully selected photographs, and on no actual evidence. Even worse than the accusation are the running commentary from Kos Kids and members of the Democratic Underground. Just awful. Makes me hang my head in mortification that these people are (presumably) fellow Americans. It's so bad that even a number of the commenters are begging their fellows to stop raking this muck...

I know I'm voicing a fantasy when I say this, but...wouldn't it be wonderful to have a Presidential election campaign that focused on actual substantive issues?

Palin Visits the Troops...

I set out this morning to see if I could find anything at all – good or bad – about Palin's attitude toward our troops. I was especially looking for anything that occurred well before her getting the VP slot. In her Dayton speech, she referenced her son Track, who's in the Army and about to be deployed to Iraq – but politicians are slippery beasts, and I wanted some evidence that was uncolored by her recent leap onto the national stage.

Well, it wasn't hard to find what I was looking for, because it turns out that last year (2007), shortly into her tenure as Governor of Alaska, she embarked on a worldwide tour to the places where Alaska's troops are serving. The top photo shows her visiting with an injured soldier in Germany (which of course immediately brings to mind Obama's snub on his recent trip). The bottom photo shows her visiting with some Alaskan troops (their faces make their Inuit heritage evident) in Kuwait. This trip was widely – and very approvingly – covered in the contemporaneous press reports.

In addition to that tour, as Governor she has made many visits to military facilities in Alaska. It's also easy to find approving references to her by military support organizations, for whom she's made publicity appearances, helped with fund raising, and made contributions herself. Even before she was Governor she was involved in these efforts.

In other words, her record demonstrates a clear commitment to our troops. The news reports at the time have many quotes from the soldiers themselves – some what you'd expect from young men who get to sit down and talk with a beauty queen; others more substantive words of praise for their Governor who so obviously cares about them. Not a negative peep of any kind.

Chalk up one more plus in her column for me...

War on Ants...

Anyone who lives in the high desert is familiar with the never-ending war against ants in the house. A house – perhaps especially a house with pets – is chock full of things that ants cherish. It's not even necessarily the food that they're after – sometimes it's just water, even splashes accidentally left on the countertop. No matter how carefully we clean up after ourselves, there always seems to be an inviting target for the ants – and the intrepid little explorer ants always find it.

Debbie absolutely loathes the ants. Me, I'm not too excited by them. But I've been doing my husbandly duty for years, trying every way I can think of to battle them. A few years ago we had our first success with the discovery of a spray formulation you can buy by mail that actually works. With this chemical warfare weapon, we were able to greatly reduce the ants living in the yard surrounding our house. This also reduced the ants we saw in the house, as many of them came from somewhere in the yard.

But it didn't eliminate the ants in the house, no matter how diligently I sprayed around the house. Without a single ant visible for several yards around the house, we'd still see hordes of them attacking some choice morsel. Usually this happened in the morning, when I'd be shaken out of my sleepiness by a shriek of dismay and anger from Debbie.

I figured that these ants must be living inside the house somewhere, or perhaps under the house. There are plenty of places that ants could use to sneak in – tiny cracks in the slab, the little spaces between cabinetry and the wall, and so on. Over time we came to suspect that there might be a colony of ants living in the very skinny-but-broad space under our granite countertops, just over the wood that underlies them. We still think that might be the case.

The challenge with these interior ants is that we don't really want to use our chemical weaponry on them. I have actually used it in a few careful cases, such as behind wood or under waterproof carpet cushion, where the chemical would be isolated from us and our pets. But we certainly wouldn't want to use it in a place like our kitchen!

A few weeks ago, Debbie and I started trying another strategy: we began patiently following the ants to find out where they were taking their ill-gotten gains. Inevitably the trail of ants led to an ant portal of some kind. One of the first things we discovered is that the ants in the kitchen were nearly all disappearing under the front edge of our countertops, where there was a roughly 1 mm crack between the edge of the rock and the wood supports. So I took out my new favorite anti-ant weapon – a tube of silicone caulking – and sealed all of that up.

A day or two later, the ants were back. So we followed them again, and discovered another ant portal behind the dishwasher. We sealed that up with more silicone caulking. A couple of days later, they popped out of another hole, so we sealed that one up. And so on, and on, and on – but not quite endlessly. As we've sealed up more and more of our house (which I'm now beginning to think of as a seive!), the ants were clearly having more and more trouble finding a way out. We are starting to think they have the look of desperation about them. And their numbers are down – way, way, down. We might actually be winning this war, and the total cost so far is two tubes of silicone caulking (from the Jamul Hardware Store, of course) and a few hours of our time. It's even taking on a bit of the aspect of a game, as Debbie and I track the little bastards down to their latest portal.

I decided to write this post because of an experience this morning. When I got up to make my morning tea, I noticed about a dozen ants going after the droplets of water in the kitchen sink. I followed them back, as has become our habit, and discovered that their new portal was in the vinyl framework of one of the bay windows in our kitchen. The ants had discovered an almost impossibly tiny crack – one sheet of paper would go into it, but not two sheets – and somehow they were squeezing through this. I think they really must be desperate! Five minutes later, that crack was sealed up.

I think our war on ants is almost over, and I'm almost ready to declare victory...

Steyn on Palin...

The incomparable Mark Steyn has a piece today about McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, and absolutely nails it. A selection:

What other country in the developed world produces beauty queens who hunt caribou and serve up a terrific moose stew? As an immigrant, I'm not saying I came to the United States purely to meet chicks like that, but it was certainly high on my list of priorities. And for the gun-totin' Miss Wasilla then to go on to become Governor while having five kids makes it an even more uniquely American story. Next to her resume, a guy who's done nothing but serve in the phony-baloney job of "community organizer" and write multiple autobiographies looks like just another creepily self-absorbed lifelong member of the full-time political class that infests every advanced democracy.
...
I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.

But do go read the whole thing!

Rain in Lawson Valley...

Not a whole lot, mind you -- just 2 mm (about 0.1 inch) as I write this. But the rocks are wet, the normally-black moss is bright green, the frogs are ecstatic, and it hasn't stopped yet...

Startup of the Week...

InformationWeek magazine is profiling the company I work for as the “Startup of the Week”. Here's the lead:

"I founded this company to atone for my sins," says Fred Luddy, CEO of Service-now.com. His transgression? Developing expensive and cumbersome IT management software while at Peregrine. Service-now provides help desk, change and configuration management, discovery, and more via easy-to-deploy SaaS. Can you forgive him?

Go read the whole thing, and decide for yourself if you forgive Fred.

Sarah Palin...

A couple of months ago, when I first heard Sarah Palin's name mentioned as a possibility for the VP slot with McCain, I did as much reading as I could about her – as I'd never heard of her before. The more I read about her, the firmer my conclusion: that there was no way McCain would choose her as his running mate. It would simply be too risky: she's light on experience (though not as light as The One), she's a solid, traditional conservative (as opposed to whatever the heck McCain is), and she's completely untested on the national stage.

Much of what I read and saw on video clips I really liked. An article written about her last year includes this paragraph, which matches what I've learned:

Her rise is a great (and rare) story of how adherence to principle--especially to transparency and accountability in government--can produce political success. And by the way, Palin is a conservative who only last month vetoed 13 percent of the state's proposed budget for capital projects. The cuts, the Anchorage Daily News said, "may be the biggest single-year line-item veto total in state history."

She is the antithesis of the pork barrel politician (a disease shared in a completely bipartisan fashion), a refreshingly direct and honest politician. Being attractive doesn't hurt a darned thing, nor does having a charming family that could have been carved from an All-American novel. She hunts, fishes, works on the family fishing boat on weekends, has five children. She also has a great track record of executive leadership, both in private business and in public service. The lefties are ignoring her roles other than governor and mayor, but the simple truth is that her experience is arguably more relevant to the Presidency than is The One's experiences, which are entirely non-executive. There's a good reason why so many more Presidents have been Governors than have been Congressmen.

Do I have any faults to find? A few, and all of the non-scary variety. She's a fundamentalist Christian, and on many issues I disagree with them. For example, as governor she has indicated a willingness (short of advocacy, though) for creationism to be taught in public schools alongside evolution. I strongly disagree with that, though in terms of importance that issue pales before national security.

In general, though, I am basically charmed by her choice as McCain's running mate. I'm not at all sure that it will play out well for McCain. For instance, how will she do in a debate with Joe Biden? I've seen video of her being interviewed by a hostile journalist, and I was impressed with her speaking and debating skills – but does she have the depth of knowledge at the national and international level that would enable her to hold her own with Joe ("The Mouth") Biden? And of course the rabidly pro-Obama press pirahnas will be all over every little gaffe she makes – real or imagined, relevant or not.

I'm fascinated that McCain would choose the one mentioned candidate that I was almost certain he would not. However he got there, the fact that he's chosen a solidly conservative, relatively young, female, status quo-bucking running mate has got to be shaking up the opposition a bit. And yes, an attractive female, wearing a skirt no less. The fact that the Republicans nominated a woman, and not the Democrats, is already rankling more than a few Hillary supporters (their blogs are full of bitter commentary on the topic).

An already interesting campaign, albeit bereft of interesting Presidential candidates, just got more interesting. And entertaining, I'm sure...

Barackopolis...

Some wit coined the term “Barackopolis” for the stage set in Invesco Field where The One will deliver his acceptance speech tonight. Though the venue is not yet open to the public, there are innumerable photos and videos available of the grand stage set, which strongly resembles Hollywood notions of ancient Roman or Greek temples. The McCain campaign has already poked fun at this, by publishing tongue-in-cheek guides for how to dress appropriately to attend the speech – in togas, of course.

I'm more bemused than amused at this. It strikes me as a perfect metaphor for the Democratic party: the party of personalities, rather than of ideas or ability. The party that promotes a rock star, instead of a doer. It makes perfect sense that there would be a grand, high-tech stage for such a candidate. I'll be disappointed if the presentation tonight doesn't include an automated light show, heavily engineered audio, careful attention to video-friendly lighting, foot-thumpin' music, and (of course!) spectacular fireworks.

On the other hand, I'll be very surprised to hear any actual ideas, plans, or commitments...

And doesn't that fit the candidate perfectly?

So now we have one of our major parties producing an entertainment spectacular instead of a public debate on ideas and issues, and in place of any real platform of plans and commitments. Let's hope that the other party can rise above this, even if just a little.

Here's a ponder for you, though. Suppose, for a moment, that The One wins the election – that the rock star campaign wins the popular vote. What do you think that portends for our future?

Watching Hillary...

I did not watch Hillary's speech last night – that is not the sort of thing that I could stand to sit through an entire hour-plus of. But, thanks to the magic of the Internet, this morning I watched several clips of the “highlights” of her speech. Here's some things that occurred to me as I watched:

• Her loss to The One has spared the U.S. citizenry from possibly dangerous exposure to one of the worst public speakers on the national stage since the dawn of television.
  
  
• What's up with the bright orange pantsuit? As my retinas burned, I had two thoughts: (1) she looked like a sort of psychodelic Chairman Mao, and (2) Sheriff Joe Arpaio must have been involved in the design.
  
  
• Those bulging eyeballs have to be mechanically aided somehow. Normal human anatomy does not include eyeball pusher-outers.
  
  
• Jaysus, woman, the shriek – please, please, please do something about the shriek!
  
  
• I didn't detect even a whiff of genuine support for The One – my overwhelming impression was of someone bulling through an extremely uncomfortable duty in a minimally acceptable fashion, giving off vibrations of righteous indignation that nearly shimmered in the air. The frequent cut-aways to Mrs. One showed her looking less-than-thrilled, and it's easy to understand why.
  

Hey, I didn't promise you intellectual stimulation at 5 in the morning!

She's Right...

Here's a McCain ad that speaks directly to the only important reason I'll vote for him over The One:


I'm deeply disappointed by both candidates, but...on the one issue that I am most concerned about (radical fundamentalist Islam), there is a clear difference between the two. I cannot even imagine Obama having a constructive or effective response to a terrorist attack, whereas I'm confident that McCain's response would be robust. And that's reason enough, in my book, to vote for McCain...

Yes, Hilary was right...