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Mike Huckabee’s website informs us of the following:

The former governor and his wife, Janet, live in North Little Rock.

North Little Rock’s main mall is none other than the…McCain Mall!  And you can bet that both he and Janet have spent a good deal of time there.

Neither he nor the Republican Party can quite get away from the guy…

While on the subject of John McCain, I found out that a friend of mine was a Navy flight instructor with John McCain.  His description of him?  "A snooty so-and-so," probably reinforced by the fact that the base was named after one of McCain’s ancestors, who were well entrenched in the U.S. Navy.  When asked about whether he really knew McCain, his reply was that he knew McCain but McCain didn’t know him: McCain "only knew himself."

"A Thinking Democrate" states the obvious in her reply to the story on the last Clinton-Obama debate:

When Hillary was asked how did she represent change in this election, her answer was that she is a woman. Come one….give me a break. If thats all we needed in this country for change we could elect a cow….

Well, we could…maybe we will.

In the hubbub of the spin room after last night’s Democratic debate in Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre, I introduced myself to Mandy Grunwald, Hillary Clinton’s media strategist, and prepared to ask a question. “Hi – you’re going to violate my I-only-speak-to-American-journalists…”, she said as I shook her hand.

I laughed. But it wasn’t a joke. “I just have this, like, you know, it’s my job to talk to people who print papers in states where we have voters – don’t take it personally but I’m going to answer his question first,” she said, pointing to Newsday’s Glen Thrush, standing behind me. I spluttered something about people clicking on internet stories. “Mmm, not so much – I’ll take his first,” Ms Grunwald responded.

When I continued to act dumbfounded, she grudgingly relented. “I knew you were going to take it personally and think it terribly rude,” she said. “Ask your question.”  So I did.

I used to love to read foreign (usually French or British) print publications, but it was an expensive habit, with the overseas postage and all.  But now we have the internet, so reading British publications at least is a snap for just about any American that can use Google.  (That’s something that Ruth Gledhill doubtless wishes I hadn’t found out!)  Drudge routinely directs his readers to UK online newspapers.  So the day when ignoring the foreign press was a way to properly budget time is gone.

On a broader view, a lot of the "carbon footprint" being created these days is by Boomers jetting around the world on pleasure trips.  It used to be said that travel "broadened" you, but looking at the results here in the U.S., my contemporaries would have been better off taking the money and flushing it down the toilet.  (I’ll leave it to you to click here and find out if I am in that category or not.)

Honestly, I thought that American conservatism had taken leave of its senses when Ann Coulter blurted out that she would vote for Hillary Clinton over John McCain.

The truth is, she and other conservatives are working under grievously false assumptions:

1. She assumes that Hillary would direct the force of anti-terrorism against Islamicist groups.  But liberals lump "fundamentalists" into one group, which means that she would doubtless take the opportunity to launch a kulturkampf against anyone who seriously believed in God.  George Bush passed up the opportunity to do the opposite, as I noted a long time ago in Levelling the Playing Field.  Like Kuan Yü in the Chinese classic Three Kingdoms, Bush did the honourable thing and allowed the Tsao-Tsao’s of the left to take a pass, thus ending the right’s last chance to "finish the job."  When the tables were turned and Tsao-Tsao captured Kuan Yü, Tsao-Tsao finished the job by beheading Kuan Yü.  In like manner Hillary, a Tsao-Tsao kind of person if there ever was one, would not reciprocate Bush’s kindness.
2. From that, it’s a fair certainty that Hillary would initiate some kind of criminal proceedings–national or international–against George Bush and his associates.  That would be a sop to the Daily Kos base of the Democrat party, to say nothing of a good publicity diversion.
3. For those of you who think that the first two are unrealistic, the Clintons’ record shows that they have no problem using the IRS and other police agencies of the government to punish political enemies.  That, conservatives, means you.  Is that what you want?
4. Conservatives are generally banking that a Democrat victory in 2008 would lead to a repeat of 1980 or 1994, where conservatives either took the White House (Reagan) or Congress.  But America has changed since then; conservatism just doesn’t have the appeal it used to, as I discussed in Mike Huckabee and the Dilemma of American Conservatives.   That kind of turnaround also assumes that the Democrat in the White House is weak (Carter) or unprepared for reversal (Clinton.)  Since the latter was in the White House during the last debacle, it’s safe to assume that she has learned from her mistakes.  Or at least would try to.  And, of course, if the first three points work for Hillary Clinton, this one will be impossible.

Conservatives, like most Americans, go on blissfully thinking that things will always work the way they have in the U.S.  But that kind of thinking led to our difficulties in Iraq.  With dollar hegemony in danger and a debt-laden financial system desperate for relief, anything can happen.  It’s time to think outside the box.

P.S. If Rush Limbaugh and Hillary Clinton can’t get voting in Palm Beach straight, it won’t matter who they vote for.

I’m sure that many conservatives–to say nothing of Lou Dobbs–will go postal over the idea that illegal immigrants would get tax rebates, as is proposed (unintentionally?) in the House package.

In their bipartisan zeal to quickly cut a deal on an economic stimulus bill, GOP lawmakers overlooked something that will certainly inflame the conservative base–illegal immigrants could receive a tax rebate check from the government.

The text of the House passed bill contains language making "non resident aliens"–illegal immigrants–ineligible for the tax rebates. But every year, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants use individual taxpayer identification numbers, known as ITINs, to file income tax returns with the IRS. These ID numbers are used instead of Social Security numbers. There are no exact statistics for how many illegal immigrants file tax returns, but this New York Times story from last year details the significant increase in use of ITINs.  This story also lays out the issue.

Immigration advocates point out that many legal immigrants use ITINs, so it would be impossible to outlaw rebates for everyone who uses this form of ID in tax returns.

Personally, I don’t see giving tax rebates to those with no legal status here.  (Neither do I see forcing ordinary citizens to be snitches on these people, as some recently enacted state laws require.)  However, it’s more likely that the illegal immigrants would either save their rebate or send it back to their impovrished families rather than blow it on new stuff, as many native born citizens are wont to do.

A good usage for the money would be to pay down debt, sensible especially since this economic crisis is driven by the partial collapse of the credit system, and its danger is prolonged by the high level of indebtedness of our population.

Sad to say, that’s not the "American way" any more.

A couple of weeks ago, I opined the following:

…the whole Evangelical game plan for life is well suited to get people off of the very bottom of society and equally ill-suited to get them to the very top.  People who posit George W. Bush as an example of the contrary forget that a) he comes from a prominent family with the educational and social opportunities that come with it, all of which are missing from most Evangelicals’ personal arsenals, and b) has done some patently unbiblical things (mostly in the Middle East) which indicate he is not as sharp of an Evangelical as many thought he was.

Evidently there are others who are coming to the same conclusion, about George W. Bush at least:

The tapes reveal how political the faith of George W Bush is. Wead said that during the countless hours the two spent talking about religion over a dozen years, they discussed endlessly the implications of attending services at different congregations, how Bush could position himself in relation to various tricky questions and how he should handle various ministers and evangelical leaders. But the substance of Bush’s own faith never came up.

Wead told me that he now struggles with the question of how sincere Bush’s expressions of devotion ever were. He often goes over their conversations and the many memos he sent to Bush advising him how to woo the religious vote. “As these memos started flowing to him, he started feeding back to me what his faith was,” Wead said. “Now what is interesting for me, and I’m trying to understand is, was I giving him his story?”