LIFE IF HARD when you're a mother working with $500,000+ a year in the family budget (and likely much more than that.)

And if your wondering why medical cost are out of control and tuition costs continue to sky rocket, consider that a university hospital is paying Michelle Obama $300,000+ a year to do "community outreach".  The more she talks the more I get that creepy "John Edwards" feeling about Mrs. Obama.

But it's actually bigger than that.  In a very short time I've come from a point where I, like everyone else, thought these were rather likable people to a place where I actually really don't like Michelle & Barack Obama.  The more you learn about them the more your realize these are phonies and demagogues, political fixers with a toxic leftist ideology who haven't been honest about who they are and were they come from politically.

KAUS has more on Bush's fake fence.  This isn't the first time Americans have been had by this President.

THEY TOLD US A "VIRTUAL FENCE" was as good as a real fence.  Well, they lied.  The incompetence of the Bush government is a thing of marvels.

AMERICAN'S HAVE A NEGATIVE VIEW OF THE NY TIMES and they believe the Times has made an explicit effort to damage the John McCain campaign.

We've come to the point where the NY Times is a damaged brand name, it's been turning out partisan crap and calling it news for years now, and the public knows it.

BILL BUCKLEY HAS DIED.  Here's the NY Times obit. Reactions at National Review's The Corner and memeorandum.

JONAH GOLDBERG takes a look at how violent fascists on the left found a happy home in "liberal" America.

TONY BLANKLEY: 

Overly broad charges against [Obama] are dangerous. Republicans will make a mistake if they take to calling him "too liberal for America." He is too liberal, but they need to make the charge specific point by specific point. If they try to pigeonhole him as a liberal, he will refuse to perch in such a hole. He is a golden falcon, not a fat pigeon. He will swoop down verbally on his accuser and point out how he is not liberal at all on that point -- but his accuser's record is.

For instance, if he is accused of being in bed with the teachers union, he will point out (even while still in his pajamas after a motel night with the union, metaphorically speaking) that he once told a Milwaukee newspaper he was open to considering vouchers -- even though he is against them -- if it would be good for the kids. Make no mistake, this guy isn't only good with inspirational rhetoric; when it comes to policy slipperiness, he makes Bill Clinton look slow-witted and honest.

IT'S PAST TIME to get the DRAFT SARAH PALIN for Vice President movement up and rolling.  Imagine how the arguments against Palin would boomerang against Barack Obama.  They'd say that Palin doesn't have the experience -- but she actually has years and years of executive experience.  Obama has, let's see, oh yes.  None.  They tout Barack Obama as a "community organizer" -- Palin actually "organized" real communities as a mayor, on the city council, and in dozens of civic organizations.  Obama was a hired agent of a left wing 60's style political "charity", a political organizer working with actual 60's era terrorists and bombers. 

I'm sure leftists, Democrats and big city journalists would make fun of were Palin is from -- the podunks of Alaska and Idaho -- and they'll suggest she comes from a place so isolated and alien from the rest of America that she can't understand the country.  That will score big points contrasting with a candidate who came of age in the isolated left-wing Ivory Tower of several elite private universities, a candidate who took many of his first history and civics lessons in Indonesia, and who says his greatest influences were his "fellow traveler" mother (as described by her oldest friends) and the various leftist mentors, friends, and university pals he met through the years, folks who were big fans of Fanon, Alinsky, Farrakhan, and other from the fascist left.

We can't depend on the "go along with the left, to get along with the left" Republicans to get the message out that will defeat the Democrats.  George Bush wouldn't do it in 2004 -- the New Media and outside campaign organization did the job George Bush wouldn't do to win the 2004 election.  The same will be the case with John McCain.  Not only don't these guys have the inclination, they don't have the smarts or the knowledge or the talent. 

So it's our job.  If we don't do it for them, they'll lose like George Bush would have lost in 2004.  Sit around and we'll get a ticket like 1996 with Dole-Kemp.  We've already sat on our hands a let the top of the ticket get away from us.  We can turn this thing around -- by drafting PALIN FOR VICE PRESIDENT.

Let's do it.

RICK MORAN HAS A GREAT POST on Barack Obama's little problem of his history of involvement with the fascist left:

[60's terrorists] Ayers and Dohrn are simply the most visible of the far left supporters who propelled Barack Obama's early political career .. I should add that I don't believe Obama is a dangerous man in the sense he would overturn the government and turn the US into some gigantic gulag. But if the voters knew the half of it, Obama would have been marginalized as a far left liberal as surely as Dennis Kucinich.

Rather naively, Moran asks:

Will the media expose Obama? Will they criticize Senator McCain if he tries to paint Obama as a radical? Will they dig deep into Obama's associations and associates to discover the truth?

The answer, of course, is certainly no, they won't.

ANYONE ELSE REVOLTED by Tom Hanks's humiliating use of American servicemen as propaganda stooges for the Hollywood left?

Hollywood spends all year and a few hundred million dollars emboldening the enemy and undercutting the mission of our troops in Iraq this year, but now tries to make up for it by having some Iraq troops as presenters.

BARACK OBAMA got his start in politics with the help of an unapologetic 60's era terrorist.  The man was blowing up buildings -- and likely played a role in accidentally killing some of his co-terrorists -- while John McCain was holed up in the Hanoi Hilton.  Will McCain use this against Obama?  McCain no doubt knows he's in an incredibly weak position to do so because many in the press are more sympathetic to the leftist bombers of the 60's than they are to the men and women who served in the Armed Forces -- any idiot who reads the New York Times can't have missed that.   In any case, it's just not McCain's style to take on the left.  Rather, the McCain style is to hitch his wagon to one or another of the current leftist fashions, and curry favor with leftist in the press via that some bit of legislation.  Of course, his most current leftist crusade is the "human made global warming" buncombe.

So don't go looking for McCain to pin the leftist tale on the Obama donkey.  He doesn't have the guts or inclination to do it.

YES, VIRGINIA, the Republican ship is full of rats -- another GOP Congressmen is indicted by the Feds.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE not to laugh at John McCain, seeing him stuck in the mess of campaign finance law, and blocked by the bureaucracy because the Congress has failed to approve Bush appointees -- just the pathology McCain supported against the Republicans and the President during the "gang of 14" episode.

An eye-opening account of John McCain's character, his governing style, and his agenda for America can be heard here.

DID JOHN MCCAIN screw a sexy blond lobbyist, exchanging political favors for sexual favors? -- the New York Times just wants to know.  Of course, the timing of this story couldn't have anything to do with the fact that McCain has just wrapped up the Republican nomination and a true leftist after the NYT's own heart is about to take him on in the race for the White House.  The timing of this decades old "where's the story?" news "report" couldn't have anything to do with that. 

Hey, John McCain, welcome back to the GOP.  You bought yourself ten years of friendship with the Main Stream Media with your incessant trashing and betraying of the Republicans and the conservative movement.  But the party is over.  The "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic of your relationship with the leftist press has officially come to its end.  You "my friend" are now enemy number one in the MSM.  And you know what?  You're on your own. 

Good luck, John.

UPDATE:  Tom Maguire the "everything you need to know" analysis.

Quote of the Day:  "If a newspaper is going to run stories about lobbyists who claim they have special relationships with members of Congress, it will run out of ink."

UPDATE II:  The New Republic has its insiders report on the battle at the New York Times to get rumors of a John McCain sexual infidelity published in its pages.  One thing is certain, executive New York Times editor Bill Keller isn't lying when he says the McCain story "met all of our standards."

"THE TROUBLE, at least for me, is the huge and deceptive gap between his captivating oratory and his actual views." -- Robert Samuelson on Barack Obama.  More:

If you examine [Obama's] agenda, it is completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems ..

A favorite Obama line is that he will tell "the American people not just what they want to hear but what we need to know." Well, he hasn't so far ..

He has run on the vague promise of "change," but on issue after issue -- immigration, the economy, global warming -- he has offered boilerplate policies that evade the underlying causes of the stalemates ..

The contrast between [Obama's] broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the media .. have treated his invocation of "change" as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation's major problems when, so far, he isn't.

NO PRIDE IN AMERICA. Not only has Michelle Obama repeatedly said she takes no pride in America, these are her own written words.  I especially like it when she says it in a suit costing more than many folks make in a month.

MOVE ALONG NOW, no alarm bells going off here.

CAN'T MCCAIN get a better writer?  This stuff is just dreadful.  And it's even worse on TV the way McCain reads it -- halting, monotone, and passionless.  Certainly not as if they were his real thoughts and emotions.  His writers have no sense for McCain's own voice, his own passions, his own ideas.  McCain may not have many, but he has some.  Someone with talent please help this man.

You try to do a reading of a line like this:

I will fight every moment of every day in this campaign to make sure Americans are not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history and a return to the false promises and failed policies of a tired philosophy that trusts in government more than people.

This is almost the definition of bad writing.  Can't Bill Kristol or the Journal spare an office boy or two for this man?

MCCAIN IS winning less than half the vote in Washington State.  And Romney -- who's not even any longer in the race -- is still running a strong neck and neck with Huckabee for second place with about 1 out of every 5 votes in the state.  My parents were among these many holdout Romney voters -- they simply didn't like the McCain and Huckabee alternatives to Romney.  Even though the race is over, people are still motivated to get out and vote again McCain, but not so many are motivated to come out and give McCain a rousing show of support on the way to the nomination.  McCain simply doesn't inspire the Republican party, outside of some Rupert Murdoch offices in New York and Washington, D.C.

OBAMA HAS and will continue to get a free ride from the press and the political establishment.  We're still living in a world where it is more dangerous and more frowned upon to honestly discuss a politician's leftist ideology and leftist life influences than it is to be a politician who led that life on the left.  Well Obama has led that life and we need to talk about it. 

During Obama's teen years, one of the men who influence him enough to write about it was a man named Frank Marshall Davis, a committed man of the left with years of experience in the Soviet Union's various communist front groups and political parties.  Never in our history have we had a President who's grown up so much on the left and within the left -- the real true radical left.  No one is suggesting that Obama is the Manchurian candidate, but everyone is becoming aware that Obama not simply another standard issue old school liberal like Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson.  He's something we've never seen before, and it will be interesting to see to what extent traditional Democrats in the press and around the country are roused or repelled by a politician with a genuine radical paternity -- something the Democrats have mostly rejected outside of very short periods in the late 1940s or the early 1970s.  And even Henry Wallace and George McGovern in their growing up were very far from textbook raised lefty radicals -- they were much more men of the farm country who were used as vessel by radical activists for their own ends.  Barack Obama is something very different.  How different is the great mystery of the Presidential election.  And most everyone in the political class remains too intimidated by the power of the leftist idea within the establishment to make any effort to find out.

UPDATE:  Bumped back to the top:

Any chance John McCain knows who Saul Alinsky or Franz Fanon are?  They're some of Barack Obama's hero's and influences, and I'm rather certain John McCain is beyond his pay grade going up against someone with this sort of background ..

Here's a picture of Barack Obama in Chicago teaching the principles of Saul Alinsky. Notice the flow chart indicating the flow of money and power out of productive businesses ("CORP") and into the political class ("MAYOR"):
 
 

The heading at the top reads "POWER ANALYSIS". The sub-heading reads "RELATIONSHIPS BUILD ON SELF INTEREST". The symbol on the arrow between "CORP" and "MAYOR" is the "$" sign.

A FAILURE AND A MEDIOCRITY. Dan Walters on Arnold Schwarzenegger:

The budget mess - which Schwarzenegger promised to fix when he was elected in 2003 - is another blot on a record which, if truth be known, is no more than mediocre. The governor makes many grandiose promises and keeps very few of them.

Schwarzenegger is blaming everyone and everything but himself for the budget deficit, pegged at $14.5 billion during the rest of this fiscal year and all of the next. But if he really had the guts that the current crew of media admirers tells us he has, he'd shoulder the blame himself.

It's not the economy, even though he insists that flattening economic activity, born of the housing industry's free-fall, is to blame. Before the current downturn, the economy was humming along and generating tens of billions of dollars in new state revenues, giving him and lawmakers an opportunity to bring the state's finances into balance with minimal pain. But they spent every dollar and then some.

Schwarzenegger also blames automatic spending formulas built into the budget, including, presumably, one that he himself championed. All of those formulas could have been suspended or altered if there had been sufficient political leadership.

Schwarzenegger tried to change budget dynamics in a series of ballot measures in 2005, only to fail miserably - thanks in large measure to the embarrassingly inept manner in which he and his advisers conducted the campaign.

Schwarzenegger did, indeed, have an opportunity to become a transcendent and transformational political figure. But he blew it through a deadly combination of ignorance and hubris. That's the real story that the fawning media should be telling.

MICHELLE OBAMA has never felt pride in America (her convincingly expressed words).  And we know one reason why -- the "benevolent" racism she experienced via her participation in Princeton's deeply racist affirmative action program.

DON'T MESS with Google -- they just might de-list you.  Read also this -- and consider linking to it.

BUSH THE FIRST trashes conservatives as part of his endorsement of John McCain -- giving conservatives another chance to remember why they happily threw him out of the White House in 1992.

IT SEEMS MORE CLEAR each day that Barack Obama's wife comes from the hate-America-first left.  And it's easy to predict that Mrs. Obama will get special protection and affection from the Main Stream Media because of it.  Contrary to what some conservative talking heads are saying, I really don't think John McCain has any clue what to do with this sort of thing -- it's completely outside of his life experience.  It isn't as if McCain spent the central part of his young adulthood battling the hard left the way Ronald Reagan did in Hollywood.  McCain comes from an America where ideological battles and the left really didn't exist.  Today's university campuses are dominated by the left.  I can't image there were any leftist at John McCain's Naval Academy in the mid-1950s.  My sense of it is that McCain sees the left as something exotically foreign and marginal to the the American experience -- a sort of weird communist alien invasion that came and went with Jane Fonda and the anti-war movement of the 1960s.  He doesn't see his Democrat friends like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingolds as the plodding titular heads of a left wing cultural-political movement with vast wells of power in the media, in the Universities, and in the unions.  He doesn't see it because he doesn't have the life experience or frame of reference to see it, to understand it.  The divide between Ronald Reagan, the conservative movement and John McCain is in large measure this enormous gap of vision.  Reagan and the conservatives over time acquired the education and the life experience to see the left for what it is.  John McCain didn't and can't, and he'll be as clueless and hopeless as Bob Dole when up against it.

UPDATE:  Any chance John McCain knows who Saul Alinsky or Franz Fanon are?  They're some of Barack Obama's hero's and influences, and I'm rather certain John McCain is far beyond his pay grade going up against someone with this sort of leftist background.  McCain was not a particularly able student at the Naval Academy -- he graduated among the worst students at bottom of his class.  And he's a man of the non-ideological, consensus 1950s.  McCain's Naval education and career provide him with no conception of the ideas which inform and motivate his Ivy League leftist opponent.  This ignorance on McCain's part won't be an advantage in the contest ahead.

Here's a picture of Barack Obama in Chicago teaching the principles of Saul Alinsky. Notice the flow chart indicating the flow of money and power out of productive businesses ("CORP") and into the political class ("MAYOR"):
 
 

The heading at the top reads "POWER ANALYSIS". The sub-heading reads "RELATIONSHIPS BUILD ON SELF INTEREST". The symbol on the arrow between "CORP" and "MAYOR" is the "$" sign.

Malkin has the video of Mrs. Obama gesturing toward her heart and explaining how America has never been a place she's ever felt any pride about.

EVANGELICALS don't like Mormons -- hence John McCain's victory.  This was the story no one wanted to talk about in January.

GEORGE WILL seems set to endorse the Democrat party nominee against John McCain.

THE RED STATE / Blue State divide explained.

I began noticing these demographic differences independently during and after the 2003 California recall election.  The California recall was driven by the married folks with children.

THE MUSLIM INTIFADA against liberal democracy strikes Denmark.

OBAMA VS. McCAIN -- A TIMELINE. We've never had a bigger "experience gap" between Presidential candidates.  John McCain will be the oldest newly elected President in American history if he wins, and Barack Obama will be one of the youngest.  John McCain has done many things in his career.  Barack Obama has done just a bit more than nothing.  But the gap isn't merely of age and resume, its a gap between two very different Americas.  John McCain grew up listening to radio in a world without TV, the son of a traditional family in an America with values more like those of 1800s than those of the 2000s. Barrack Obama grew up watching "Three's Company" and smoking pot in Hawaii, the son of a broken home and a polygamous non-American father.  John McCain grew up in a deeply patriotic country, the grandson of an American war hero who kicked butt fighting a mighty Asian empire.  Barrack Obama grew up in a country which had lost faith in itself, a country in which the most influential segment of the population had come to loath much of its history and many of its most important institutions.  A country with had been defeated by a weak Asian nation, with the sometime vocal support of an ever expanding leftist University culture.

If McCain folks want to illustrate the "experience gap", or the Obama folks want to illustrate the "culture gap" (or maybe they don't), I'd recommend they emphasize what might be called "the timeline gap":

1946-1949.

McCain:  attends St. Stephens School and Episcopal High School in Virginia.

Obama:  not yet born.

1954-1958.

McCain:  attends U.S. Naval Academy

Obama:  not yet born.

1959-1961.

McCain:  drinks too much, dates a stripper, neglects his studies in flight school.

Obama:  not yet born.

1961.

McCain: on alert duty as a fighter pilot during the Cuban missile crisis.

Obama:  is born.  Spits up, poops.

1967-1969.

McCain: survives fire and explosion on the U.S.S. Forrestal.  Flies combat missions over North Vietnam.  Is captured and imprisoned by the vicious North Vietnamese, who torture and humiliate their victims.

Obama:  lives in Jakarta, Indonesia where he speaks Indonesian and attends a Catholic school.

1969-1971.

McCain:  continued imprisonment in the "Hanoi Hilton" and other North Vietnamese prison camps.

Obama:  is enrolled in the Basuki School in Jakarta, Indonesia where he attends weekly Muslim services and instruction in Islam. Obama writes a school paper in which he expresses a desire to be "President" (of Indonesia?) so that he can "make people happy."

I'll add more later.

THE ELITE REPUBLICANS of permanent Washington are the residents of some of the richest communities in the nation.  These are the wealthy Republican lobbyists and lawyers, the high paid Congressional staffers, the elite of the military industrial complex, and by overwhelming margins their candidate for President is John McCain.  McCain is taking 63% of the vote in Fairfax County to Huckabee's 25%, and in the county of Arlington McCain is taking 69% to Huckabee's 17%. In the city of Alexandria McCain has 70% of the vote to Huckabee's 16%.  Overall McCain is taking 60% of the vote in Northern Virginia.  Without these overwhelming margins among the D.C. Republicans John McCain would have done much more poorly in the state of Virginia, a state where McCain is showing surprising weakness even in the Naval community of Norfork.

MORE NUMBERS come in from the Washington GOP caucus.   The count has been corrected and supplemented -- but the counting isn't yet over.  The Republicans in Washington seem to be working on the old premise that their votes don't count and nobody cares what their real numbers are.  That's how it always was when the Washington vote took place well after everything was already over in the national contest.

EVEN MAINSTREAM media lefties are starting to get creeped out by the Obama campaign.

And don't miss this.

TALK ABOUT NO PAPER TRAIL. They said David Souter had no paper trail.  They said Chancey Gardener was a cypher spouting lovely, gaseous cliches.  But Souter was merely a judge, and Gardener no more than a work of fiction.  But we're about to put this guy into the White House.

There's got to be a real tension building in those newsrooms which still have reporters who like actual news, and not mere celebrity and horse race blather.  Their deepest emotions desire a leftist President in the White House, but the best news story sitting like a elephant in the news room is the story of the disconnect between Obama's history as a race-based far left activist living a raced-based life in a black racist church and his 180 degree opposed campaign for President as a post-racial candidate with a post-ideological agenda of politics by universal consensus.

So far, most all of America's dogged newshounds have avoided the story like a boy with a fear of water at a swimming party.  It's as if reporting the biggest story of the year would end their careers.  And maybe, at say CBS or the NY Times, it would.  The unfolding story of how reporters handle this issue over the next nine months will be one of the more interesting factors in the campaign.  And how things turn out will reveal much about the news profession, and there's even a small chance we'll learn something new about this cypher Obama himself.

THE MCCAIN 'VICTORY' in the Washington State caucuses was a phony as the laugh track on a Disney channel comedy, and the McCain aligned chairman of the state GOP simply spun a crushing McCain defeat into a victory by "reporting" an uncompleted and non-binding preliminary straw poll as the "outcome" of the caucuses.  It looks in fact like McCain was wiped out in every Congressional District except Seattle / King County.  What a disgrace.

AN UNCLASSIFIED Rand report for the U.S. Army describes the poor judgment and professional mediocrity behind America's botched war in Iraq.  The report was produced in 2005, but the powers that be have keep the report from public eyes -- and the thing still isn't being released to you and I, but merely "leaked" to a reporter.  Franks, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, the President, each and every one of them performed unsatisfactorily in the face of the Iraqi challenge.  You come away believing the President was poorly served, but not strong enough or intelligent enough to know it or do anything about it.  There is no MacArthur here, no Truman, no Eisenhower, no Marshall, no FDR.  A sad chapter that didn't have to be.

IT TURNS OUT that the Republican party chair who called the Washington caucuses for John McCain with the neck and neck vote uncompleted is part of the political machine of John McCain's Washington state co-chair.  This thing really does stink to high heaven.

And the vote still hasn't been counted.

UPDATE:  What a mess.

And now this -- up to one in four voters won't have their votes counted in the upcoming Washington state primary.

POLIPUNDIT considers what a McCain Presidency might look like.

IT'S NOT TOO BIG OF A GUESS to predict that John McCain is going to lose among the YouTube generation.

IS THERE A SINGLE NEO-CON who isn't a chicken hawk?  Just asking.

Bill Kristol and the rest of the neo-cons view McCain as as one of their own, so why doesn't McCain get the neo-con label?   I'm wondering if the reason McCain isn't considered a neo-con himself is simply due to the fact that he's served.

I CALLED THE WASHINGTON STATE Republican Party this morning and party officials say that they will let people know the actual vote results and who actually won the Republican caucus later this afternoon.  You can read the results when they are posted here.   The shenanigans the GOP elites tried to pull this weekend are the kind of things that leaves citizens cynical about the politics.  Saturday night the party was saying the final results would be tallied Sunday morning.  Yesterday afternoon they were saying the vote would be counted Monday morning.  Now more delay.  The party only had about 13,000 voters.  The problem can't be the adding up of these small numbers ...

UPDATE:  Pudge at Sound Politics weighs in on "the meaninglessness of the Presidential preference tally" in the Washington caucuses.  Well, yes.  Not so significant in terms of what happens next in the arcane workings of the Washington caucus process, but significant in terms of the most important thing this election season -- the perception race.  The nationally important perceptions race and the fresh air of sunshine into the process are the only reasons to release any result from the caucus --  and the party botched it.

UPDATE II:  There is a gigantic Red State / Blue State divide in the state of Washington.  Eastern Washington is traditional Barry Goldwater / Ronald Reagan country -- libertarian and socially conservative.  Western Washington is much more Country Club Republican territory.  Well, the votes that weren't counted in the Washington caucus were Eastern Washington votes -- and the Red State Easter Washington Republicans are as mad as hell:

I am a Washington State precinct committee officer in one of the rural areas of our state.

There are a number of things wrong with the WA caucus.

One is that me and a number of people from my community took valuable time out of our Saturday to go and caucus.  Then, when I call the state party office I am told that the declaration was made even though they did not get the official results from "some people" in the rural areas who may be sending the results in via snail mail. 

Aaarrgghhh... I said... That would be me!

So my question to the party was whether or not we should have even shown up to caucus?  I mean I expect that the good folks in Seattle would dearly love to have us show up on the second Tuesday in November.  Considering we are likely to have a knock down drag out rematch between Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregiore.

It is this kind of treatment by the party establishment that has fueled the suspicions of the grass roots folk such as me.

Add to those suspicions the generic dislike for John McCain and you have a "not good" scenario potentially building for the general election.

Disclaimer: I am a former Fred head who became a soft Romney voter who ended up caucusing for Huckabee to send a message to the McCainiacs that he still has work to do.  And for what it is worth, my precinct did not include ONE McCain vote.  And we were not counted by Luke Esser?

Also this:

I happen to be a Precinct Committee Officer for one of the rural counties that are NOT included in that "McCain victory" poll that Esser is touting.

I called the party office today and the kind secretary said that all the votes had not been counted and that some of the rural counties rely on snail mail to deliver results. WELL DUH! I told her that I happen to be one of those rural precincts and can say that in MY precinct there was not ONE vote for McCain.

I can also say that I know for a fact that one of the other precincts, that was caucusing with us, had at least one other voter who said she would never be able to vote for McCain. She is a former mayor of a town here on the east side of the cascades.

Then to ad insult to injury the "official" website of the state party had on their front page a "news" story that declared "Sen. McCain Wins Republican Precinct Caucuses in Washington State."

I asked the communications director how one can "declare" anything if all the votes have not been counted? Unless of course you folks on the west side of the state really don't care to count those of us on the east side at all.

Hey Luke Esser perhaps you don't really want us to vote in November either? Care to go the general election alone?

The bloggers blog is called NW Republican.

WHAT'S COMING.  200,000 voted in the Democrat caucuses but only 13,000 voted in the Republican caucuses in the state of Washington.  And if you look closer, in the neighborhood of mere 3,000 soles in the state were motivated enough lend their support to John McCain.  With Barrack Obama it was more like 140,000.  Just as a measure of motivation and enthusiasm that's a 43 to 1 advantage for Obama over McCain.

THE REPUBLICANS in Washington State need to fire their party chairman.  We can't let "statistical analysis" done by a moron determine the outcome of political contests.

What most people don't understand is that the "science" part of statistics is the pure logic of the math, all else is background knowledge, good judgment, tacit understanding -- all of it subject to constant revision not on strict scientific grounds, but on the grounds of trial-and-error gained wisdom, wise guessing and a bit of luck.  So remember this, when someone tells you they have a "scientific" poll, what they are staying is that they are using correct math -- and they've got a lot of hard-won wisdom and judgment under their belt that has everything to do with a personally achieved background understanding, and nothing to do with "science".  And a political hack with a dog in the race isn't someone who has any of that.

America's best editorial cartoonist is on a roll.

GIVE CREDIT were credit is due -- the President notches another achievement on his Texas size belt:

"George Bush is in line to be the first president since World War II to preside over an economy in which federal government employment rose more rapidly than employment in the private sector.

CONSERVATIVES TAKE 62% of the vote in Washington, McCain takes 26%.  Another 12% remain undecided. 

Riehl World on Saturday's election results:

Yes, McCain is just so absolutely unstoppable .. Some idiot is on Fox with Hannity saying, this is a protest vote, they just want concessi