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Would you believe Obama’s female staffers make less than the men on his staff? Furthermore, would you believe McCain’s female staffers make the most? Mark Perry at Carpe Diem has the story.
… Factual Evidence:
1. Obama pays his own female Senate staffers, on average, only 78% of what he pays male staffers (see top chart above), and females make up 53% of Obama’s staff.
2. McCain pays female staffers 101% of what he pays men (see bottom chart above), and females made 62% of McCain’s staff.
3. Women occupy seven of the top 10 highest-paid positions on McCain’s staff, and five of the top 10 highest-paid positions on Obama’s staff.
4. Women on McCain’s staff earn 24% more on average than women on Obama’s Senate staff. …
Instapundit notes corruption in Venezuela.
Mark Steyn writes on the election.
… In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.” That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the Nanny State: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on Earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainable.”
More to the point, the only reason why Belgium has gotten away this long with being Belgium and Sweden Sweden and Germany Germany is because America’s America. The soft comfortable cocoon in which Western Europe has dozed this past half-century is girded by cold hard American power. What happens when the last serious Western nation votes for the same soothing beguiling siren song as its enervated allies?
“People of the world,” Sen. Obama declared sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”
No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people – the Barack Obamas of the day – were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. …
Claudia Rosett writes on the Climate Change Commissars for Forbes.
… Who are these folks setting the climate agenda?
Most Americans have never heard of Yvo de Boer, and certainly never voted for him. De Boer is a Dutchman, appointed by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2006 to head the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
De Boer is not a scientist; his bio says he has a “technical degree in social work.” Before joining the UNFCCC in the 1990s, he worked in the Dutch ministry of housing. These days, de Boer jets around the world presiding over conferences–such as last year’s two-week climate summit at a Bali beach resort–aimed at creating a global “climate change regime.” This regime rests on schemes for massive international wealth transfers, with multilateral bureaucracies calculating who owes, who pays and who gets special breaks–while related arms of these proliferating outfits crank out reports in which “science” is invoked to justify the entire set-up.
But didn’t the Nobel Peace Prize go last year to Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for their eco-warnings? Yes. And the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by a committee of five Norwegian politicians, appointed by the Norwegian parliament. They may be nice people, but their judgment seems an odd basis for sweeping new controls on the U.S. economy.
As for the U.N.’s Nobel-winning IPCC–it is a joint enterprise of two other U.N. outfits, both shot through with back-scratching politics. One is the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Program, whose director, Achim Steiner, a German, was appointed by Kofi Annan in 2006, just after serving on a panel that awarded a $500,000 environmental prize to Annan, for his personal use (which Annan surrendered only after that potential conflict of interest emerged in the press).
The other parent of the IPCC is the World Meteorological Organization, based in Geneva. The president of the WMO’s executive council is an envoy of Russia, Alexander Bedritsky; his No. 2 man, First Vice President Ali Mohammad Noorian, has been at the WMO since 1981 as the permanent representative of Iran. …
David Warren continues his look at our election.
… I had doubts about John McCain — not as a man, but as a presidential candidate — from the beginning. I preferred George W. Bush in the Republican primaries of 2000, because he was not McCain. I preferred Rudy Giuliani at the beginning of this year’s cycle, despite my considerable distaste for his views on social issues. But given a choice between McCain and Obama — were I entitled to vote in an American election — I would now pull the lever for the Republican slate without the slightest compunction.
Moreover, McCain has grown in my estimation, as circumstances have changed. He has in many ways earned his maverick reputation, together with a reputation for incorruptible patriotism. He’s the guy to make politically risky and potentially unpopular decisions, in face of the recessionary slide; and crucially, he’s the guy to make America’s most loathsome and unpredictable enemies (who are also our enemies, lest we forget) not want to test him. In his appointment of Sarah Palin, for all the sneers of the urbane and over-educated, he has suggested a way forward in which America retrieves her “core values,” which include cutting through the blather of conventional “expertise,” and distinguishing right from wrong. And she can articulate what McCain mumbles.
McCain is a man of action and accomplishment, Obama a man of “charisma” and pretty words, whose only real accomplishment has been his remarkable self-advancement. And Obama’s policy outlook, so far as it can be discerned from the usual electoral pronouncements, consists of the same snake oil the pre-Clinton Democrats had been selling continuously since they chained the Great Society to America’s ankle: that is, a constantly expanding Nanny State. I am hardly reassured by Obama’s last-lap rhetorical reassurances: you don’t send a man to Washington with a trillion dollars of candy-shop promises on medicare, education, government job-creation, “spreading the wealth” — especially when the economy has just tanked.
I wish that were the worst I could say about the man, who has survived nearly two years of campaigning for President without serious cross-examination from either the media or his media-chastened opponents. A man who, should he win the election and serve one term, will have been President of the United States longer than he has held any steady job. …
Gerard Baker of the London Times on the media’s Palin treatment and the wars that will go in the GOP.
… It’s hard to make a reasoned and fair judgment about the Alaska Governor because she has been the victim of one of the nastiest, most sustained and comprehensive slime-jobs ever performed by a hyper-partisan national and global media.
The latest piece of nonsense to hit the media’s fan this week is a fine example: the news that the Republicans paid $150,000 to kit out her and her family for the election campaign. Forget for a moment the special and ridiculous sartorial demands made of a woman and her family over three months on the campaign trail, or that the party has said it will donate the clothes to charity afterwards (she can’t keep them, in any case, under tax law). Just think how we would have scoffed if she had shown up for her television appearances in an off-the-rack dress from the Anchorage Dress Barn or if she had been spotted wearing the same jacket twice in a week.
So, the Palinphobia is so shot through with condescension and ideological incomprehension on the media’s part that trying to cut through to the reality of her political message is not easy.
Her performance on the campaign trail has been shaky, it’s true, though it has significantly improved of late (she is now talking directly to reporters more frequently than any of the other candidates). But in the absence of much hard experience of national politics it does seem as though she and her Republican handlers fell back on the Sarah Palin Story as a substitute for a political argument.
This has harmed her and distorted what she could bring to a Republican Party in renewal. There’s still a better story to be told about her record as politician in Alaska, where she has achieved more of substance than Barack Obama has in Washington.
As for the anti-intellectualism she seems to represent, this is a favourite old saw not only of the Left but also of the whole Establishment crowd. There’s an unshakeable view among the coastal elites that real wisdom is acquired only by circulating between the ivy-encrusted walls of scholarship and the Manhattan and Hollywood cocktail set.
But there’s real wisdom among those derided Americans who have never even ventured to the coasts, but whose steady consistent voice and values have been truly responsible for America’s many successes.
Interesting Boston Globe Op-Ed on the dangers of liberal bias.
… There are legitimate questions about Palin’s experience level, just as there are legitimate questions about Obama’s experience level. But according to The Huffington Post, Obama’s lack of experience is immune from criticism because he attended Ivy League schools, “was a serious and successful student,” is a well-traveled, published author, and has a diverse background. Heck, he’s me!
Yet, in every one of my encounters with America’s rural communities, the diversity of my privileged experience was eclipsed by the depth of theirs. I had rhetoric; they had well-measured speech, punctuated by forbearing silences. I had easy answers; they knew there was no such thing.
It is not that the Republican base is anti-intellectual, as David Broder claims; they are anti-elitist. An Ivy League education is hardly a universal signal of competence in anything other than the liberal cultural canon.
Despite the lofty call to unity from Obama, behind which most of us on the left supposedly rallied, this election looks like all of our previously divisive ones. Rural Americans are bracing once again for war on their communities at the hands of liberal interest groups sharing cultural preferences remote from the realities of their lives. The most liberal candidate in a generation has indeed raised up fear of his potential presidency, and I have heard nothing from those most afraid about his race.
It’s that darned halo that seems to have the man himself and his supporters so enthralled.