The Blog of Record

John Podhoretz indulges in the classic “numbered post” goodness.

Via Real Clear Politics.

It’s called ASI TETSU GTR and it was shown at SEMA 2008.

I wonder, though, if it still has those Volkswagen inerior parts and stupid transmission, and handles like a Ford Flex.

Not exactly 72, and not exactly virgins – but hey, you don’t need to die to get them.

Some history on this Joan Baez poster here, here and here.

Obama’s top advisor on race issues … explains that…

Wait – Obama has an advisor on race issues? Even several of them, if this one is the top one?

But why would a post-racial candidate need a team of advisors on race issues?

To say things like this:

since Obama is ‘biracial,’ his election won’t prove that racism has receded. White America won’t vote for blacks, Ogletree argues, and Obama’s election is possible only because he’s partly white.

Obama can’t really say that even voting for him won’t absolve you of your racism. Not himself. But he doesn’t have to when he has a team of advisors on race issues who can say it for him.

And this top advisor wants race-based reparations.

Why am I not surprised that this advisor is a Harvard law professor? I won’t even be surprized if he, like Father Pfleger, is white.

As I understand it, hybrids were meant to be a temporary, transitional stage before hydrogen fuel-cell cars were ready for mass production. But doesn’t it seem now that hybrids may be going sooner than planned? And that they will give way not to hydrogen vehicles but to battery-powered electric cars, which seem to be developing faster?

On the one hand, we have prognoses like the one from the IBM Institute for Business Value (Automotive 2020: Clarity beyond the chaos), which says, “All new vehicles in 2020 will have some level of hybridization.” (P. 10).

On the other, there’s hardly a week now without another major or minor auto company rolling out fully electric cars of varying degree of production readiness – or even entire lineups of them. And these models seem to cover every vehicle type, from ultra-compact city car to 1000-hp supercar with “a revolutionary power source” with “the possibility of several years between charging”. If this sounds too good to be true, there are less-outrageous but still incledible claims of new batteries that are several times more powerful that lithium-ion and provide a range of 250 miles (in a 650-hp car) after a 10-minute charge.

And what about range-extended EVs with a small gas engine to recharge the battery on the go, like the Chevy Volt? Will new advances in battery capacity and charging time make them even more short-lived than hybrids may turn out to be?

Transitional technologies are usually compromises, and hybrids are no exception. When you combine a gas-powered drivetrain with electric drive and hundreds of pounds of batteries in one car, it’s much more complex and expensive than a car needs to be.

Police in Belgium is sent a message: don’t touch Muslims even when they attack you with baseball bats and knives. And if you join a party that opposes islamization, you’d better be prepared to deal with the consequences.

Gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, eh?

Should conservative bloggers engage in activism like the netroots? Does the Right need its own Soros? And does it really need a rightroots movement? James Joyner doesn’t think so.

“The McCain campaign is unusually upbeat. Does it have reason to be?” asks Slate’s chief political correspondent.

As if fearing that it may, he tries hard to convince us that McCain has nothing to be upbeat about, and it all is either “deceit (aides know they’re losing badly and they’re play-acting)” or “Drudge-like self-delusion (they’re mindlessly clutching at, and believing in, any glimmer of positive news)”. The third option – “truth (there actually are real signs of hope)” - is discarded, because “when it’s in your interest for things to look positive, you tend to see them positively”.

And since it’s all doom and gloom for McCain,

[h]ow do McCain aides get around this dire picture without the aid of strong drink? Let’s just say that McCain’s campaign now relies on hope more than Obama’s does.

Hey Slate – if Obama is sure to win anyway, why are you trying so hard to persuade McCain supporters to stay home on the big day? Can it be that there’s still a chance for the old soldier if he just keeps fighting to the end?

And isn’t voter suppression supposed to be a Republican tactic?

Bond (and Henry Kissinger’s) girl Jill St. John, Brezhnev, his interpreter and Nixon at Nixon’s home in San Clemente, Cal., 1973. Photo by Wally McNamee. Story here.

And why wouldn’t he love it? It calls Sarah Palin a bitch, John McCain an ass, and Geroge W. Bush a jackass, and the commenters are far less restrained in their choice of epithets. And there’s not much else on the blog to distract from that lovely discussion. What’s not to love?

(Via Memeorandum.)

Barack Obama has an aunt in Boston:

Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr. Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.

And there’s Uncle Omar, also in Boston:

Aunt Zeituni and Uncle Omar are the children of Mr. Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama, by his third wife – the woman Mr. Obama calls “Granny” because she raised his father. Mr. Obama’s father, Barack Sr, was Onyango Obama’s son by his second wife, Akumu. That makes Zeituni and Omar a half-sister and half-brother of Mr. Obama’s father, or Mr. Obama’s half-aunt and half-uncle.

Despite living in a public housing project, and not being registered to vote, Aunt Zeituni has made a $260 contribution to the Obama campaign. This leads the Times to conclude she must be a U.S. citizen, but given Obama’s willingness to circumvent campaign finance law, that is not something that can be simply assumed.

And this shouldn’t be a surprise:

The Obama campaign was repeatedly approached for comment yesterday but had not responded at the time of going to press. It is not clear whether Mr. Obama has been in touch with his African relatives living in the US, or even whether he is aware that they are on US soil.

African relatives are great to give color to a memoir, but that seems to exhaust their purpose for Obama. Even if they live in America.

And why is it a British newspaper that discovered this story? Is Sarah Palin’s wardrobe so large that it keeps the U.S. press from working on anything else?

(Via Memeorandum.)

It looks like we now have a couple of quotations of what Obama says on the tape from a Los Angeles Times insider who claims to have seen a clip from it:

Reason we can’t release it is because statements Obama said to rile audience up during toast. He congratulates Khalidi for his work saying “Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine” plus there’s been “genocide against the Palestinian people by Israelis.”

What an Obama-loving journalist should do now is walk up to Obama and ask him, “Mr. President, I mean Senator, did you say at a 2003 dinner for Mr. Khalidi that Israel has no God-given right to occupy Palestine and that there’s been genocide against the Palestinian people by Israelis?”

If, I mean when, Obama says no, it will be a point of no return for the L.A. Times. You can bet the farm that it will never release the tape or its transcript after that.

(Link via Rand Simberg.)

…according to Dirty Harry.

Chad The Elder writes:

Today, I received an e-mail from Al Gore on behalf of MoveOn.org. In the midst of his plea for Obama volunteers was this gem:

But the stakes this year are too great for any of us to sit it out. We’re facing two wars and an economic meltdown. The climate crisis, in particular, is worsening more quickly than predicted and without strong leadership from the next president, we could face consequences right out of a science fiction movie.

No one knows science fiction movies like Al Gore.

 You do need to know science fiction in order to build a lucrative business on it.

Newsweek headline: “Jesus And Witches. Video clips of Sarah Palin attending Alska church services have raised questions about her views on Christianity and government“.

Sorry again, no excerpt. Because I’m not reading it until I see a Newsweek headline saying, “Clinging to their Bibles. Obama’s remarks have raised questions about his views on Christianity”.

Because a phrase like “they cling to their Bibles” surely sounds strange coming from someone who said (in a 2004 interview), “I have a deep faith … I’m rooted in the Christian tradition.”

(That’s the same interview in which Obama says that sin for him is “[b]eing out of alignment with my values” and “Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely”. Jeremiah Wright? A “good friend”.)

I guess I’ll have to live without ever finding out Newsweek’s answers to the questions it so bravely raises.

Obama rally in Chester, Pennsylvania, October 28, 2008. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That’s what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That’s the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.

Thus spoke Obama in November 2007 to ACORN Votes leaders, and the text is from a cached version of the February 21, 2008 issue of ACORN’s newsletter called ACORN E-News.

He is obvioulsy proud of the honor of having worked for ACORN.

On the same page, you’ll also find this:

Texas ACORN Joins Obama to Fight Foreclosures

Texas ACORN members Teresa and Edward Molina and Rebecca DeZavala, all victims of the subprime crisis, and Texas ACORN Policy Director Michelle McClelen participated in an economic roundtable in San Antonio on Tues., Feb. 19, with Sen. Barack Obama to discuss predatory lending and the foreclosure crisis.

Victims of the subprime crisis? Predatory lending? Quick, we need to spread some wealth around!

Via: Will ACORN Steal the Election? (Accuracy in Media).

I’ve always thought of the Maldives as a vacation paradise, and didn’t know this:

The Maldives is one of the few states – such as Saudi Arabia – that allows only one faith to be practiced publicly, and even insists that all citizens must be Muslims.

The details that follow are rather extreme.

North Korea prison camps:

If a female inmate got pregnant … she and her lover would be shot to death publicly. Then … prison guards would cut open her womb, remove the fetus and bury it or feed it to guard dogs.

Forced abortions are common, and if babies are born, many are killed, sometimes before the mother’s eyes, defectors say. Grandparents also may be punished since whole families are imprisoned.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – the land of just and equal income redistribution and everything it always brings.

I loved it in 1999, and I love it now. A sports car with (some) pick-up truck utility and great looks. And it’s a Honda.

It would’ve been great even without the 4-to-2-seater, hard-top-to-open-top, just-press-the-button transformation, the hybrid AWD with a gas engine driving the front end and electric motors in the rear wheels, and the regenerative brakes charging the batteries on the go. Just being a cool-looking 2-seat sporty pick-up with a revvy Honda engine would have been enough.

Links:

http://world.honda.com/Tokyo1999/auto/showmodel/spocket.html

http://www.conceptcarz.com/vehicle/z484/Honda-Spocket.aspx

Long video with lots of talking in Japanese:

Short video not showing much:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2263487665787762522&hl=en