Germans overwhelmingly back Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama over Republican contender John McCain, a poll showed, though a majority said the U.S. election outcome won’t affect relations with Europe.

Seventy-four percent of Germans say they would prefer Obama as president, with only 11 percent supporting McCain, according to the Forsa survey for N-TV and Die Welt newspaper. Among Germans under 30 years old, 84 percent said they back the Democratic senator from Illinois.

Obama boosted his popularity in Germany last month when he delivered a speech in Berlin’s central Tiergarten park that drew some 200,000 people. Germans also favor positions held by Obama such as his opposition to the Iraq war, combating global warming and greater engagement with European allies.

Wow… good to know that Germans support Obama. Meanwhile, American citizens who actually can elect him are liking him less and less. See? Campaigning in Europe did pay off! But hey, the mainstream media’s gotta do what they can to make it seem like their boy is still the Savior. So even if McCain is outpolling Obama, they have to find a way to make it appear that Obama is still the popular choice.

So hey, when you’re voting in November, just make sure to remember that Germany backs Obama. I’m sure it’ll be an instrumental factor in your decision.

Hat Tip: My colleague Warner Todd Huston at Stop the ACLU

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Can you imagine the horrors of having to fly with regular people? I mean, jeez.

In all honesty, I sort of wonder if this video is a spoof. It kind of seems like it. If it is, it was a good one. But with celebrities, you never really can tell, can you?

Hat Tip: Ace of Spades

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Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s big speech on Thursday night will be delivered from an elaborate columned stage resembling a miniature Greek temple.

The stage, similar to structures used for rock concerts, has been set up at the 50-yard-line, the midpoint of Invesco Field, the stadium where the Denver Broncos’ National Football League team plays.

Some 80,000 supporters will see Obama appear from between plywood columns painted off-white, reminiscent of Washington’s Capitol building or even the White House, to accept the party’s nomination for president.

He will stride out to a raised platform to a podium that can be raised from beneath the floor.

The show should provide a striking image for the millions of Americans watching on television as Obama delivers a speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination.

Politicians in past elections have typically spoken from the convention site itself, but the Obama campaign liked the idea of having their man speak to a larger, stadium-sized crowd not far from where the Democratic National Convention is being held, at the Denver pro basketball arena.

Obama was taking a page from the campaign book of John Kennedy in 1960 when the future president delivered his acceptance speech to 80,000 people in the Los Angeles Coliseum.

Once Obama speaks, confetti will rain down on him and fireworks will be fired off from locations around the stadium wall.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Seriously… never would I have imagined that Barack Obama would plan something this ridiculous. And the guy wonders why most Americans see him as an arrogant, elitist snob. He tries to play himself off as an everyman, and then pulls this?! People are tired of the fawning adulation from the media and from Democrats. They’re tired of the Obamamessiah passing himself off as some kind of Savior. If Obama was smart, he’d start coming down to Earth… using less of the arrogant God stuff and more of the “I’m just a regular guy” stuff. Performing a speech on a raised platform in a Greek temple with confetti raining from the sky and fireworks is more than a little bit ridiculous. Who in his campaign thought this would endear him to undecided voters? The only people who will like this are the people who are already locked in for Obama. The ones still deciding will be turned off by this. But hey, whatever makes his loss easier in November is good with me. And this was definitely not a good decision.

When your set-up is so ridiculous that it’s impossible to use any snark, it’s a sign that you probably should go with something more subdued. Just a tip.

Hat Tip: Ace of Spades

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So, a Fox News reporter wants to give them a platform to express their thoughts and opinions freely, and this is a bad thing? Could it possibly be because they aren’t accustomed to being questioned and asked to express in detail what they stand for? Chanting easy-to-remember slogans is simple. Actually expressing coherent and intelligent thought is not quite as simple.

And so what if Fox News isn’t idealogically exactly the same as they are? I thought liberals were the proponents of tolerance and diversity. Theoretically there shouldn’t be any problem then. But, surprise surprise, the only intelligent answer these idiots could give was “Fuck Fox News”. Nice.

Hat Tip: Dr. Helen

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In the midst of the chants of “Love, Peace, Justice” were chants of “KILL MICHELLE MALKIN!”.

But these are peace activists, right?

Best quote (from Michelle, of course):

It’s not going to make me leave, so shut up.

I didn’t think it was possible to think Michelle was much awesomer than I already did, but there you go. She didn’t even flinch. Didn’t get rattled. Just kept on going.

What’s really sad is that the police did nothing… didn’t intervene when a mob was screaming for an innocent person to be killed, when they surrounded her and wouldn’t let her leave. The police did nothing.

Yet strangely, this is unsurprising. It’s exactly what we’ve all expected would happen in Denver this week.

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House Democratic leaders and protesters waving McCain signs had a war of words Tuesday at a press event outside an old train station. The demonstrators interrupted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with chants of “Drill here! Drill now!”

Pelosi paused and asked the group, “Right here?”

Seeming to enjoy the back and forth, she followed with another question: “Can we drill your brains?”

She went on to refer to the protesters, who continued to chant sporadically, as “handmaidens of Big Oil.” Arguing that increased offshore drilling would reduce gas prices by only a couple of pennies a decade from now, she referred to the demonstrators as the “2-cents-in-10-years-crowd.”

Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer swiped at the demonstrators, too, saying that “sophomoric chanting” won’t solve the energy crisis and that “all thinking Americans know” — stressing the word “thinking” and looking at the crowd — that America doesn’t have a quarter of the word’s fossil fuels yet uses a quarter of the world’s energy.

When you don’t have anything intelligent to add, what do you do? Name call and use insults, the preferred tactics of liberals everywhere!

On a tip from Robert Bluey

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Part of the reason is because of stuff like this. It didn’t surprise me in the least to see something like this being attributed to her. Not one little bit. Seeing as how I never watch her show, I couldn’t tell you why it doesn’t surprise me, just that it doesn’t.

Guys, did you know that your wives are dreaming of divorce? Girls, did you know that if you are happy with your marriage it means you are delusional? Well, guess what? One of Oprah’s harpies is here to show you all about how much marriage sucks! And, of course, in this particular case it’s all because the wife is wonderful and the husband is an inconsiderate doofus. Which, you know, is not normal at all for women to portray. I went ahead and emphasized my favorite parts.

I contemplate divorce every day. It tugs on my sleeve each morning when my husband, Will, greets me in his chipper, smug morning-person voice, because after 16 years of waking up together, he still hasn’t quite pieced out that I’m not viable before 10 a.m.

It puts two hands on my forehead and mercilessly presses when he blurts out the exact wrong thing (”Are you excited for your surprise party next Tuesday?”); when he lies to avoid the fight (”What do you mean I left our apartment door open? I never even knew our apartment had a door!”); when he buttons his shirt and jacket into the wrong buttonholes, collars and seams unaligned like a vertical game of dominoes, with possibly a scrap of shirttail zippered into his fly.

It flicks me, hard, just under the eye when, during a parent-teacher conference, he raises his arm high in the air, scratches his armpit, and then –then! — absently smells his fingers.

…

In retrospect, it was an excellent question, a question that I’ve asked myself from altar to present, both incessantly and occasionally. What am I doing here?

Don’t misunderstand: I would not, could not disparage my marriage (not on a train, not in the rain, not in a house, not with a mouse). After 192 months, Will and I remain if not happily married, then steadily so. Our marital state is Indiana, say, or Connecticut — some red areas, more blue. Less than bliss, better than disaster. We are arguably, to my wide-ish range of reference, Everycouple.

Nor is Will the Very Bad Man that I’ve made him out to be. Rather, like every other male I know, he is merely a Moderately Bad Man, the kind of man who will leave his longboat-sized shoes directly in the flow of our home’s traffic so that one day I’ll trip over them, break my neck, and die, after which he’ll walk home from the morgue, grief-stricken, take off his shoes with a heavy heart, and leave them in the center of the room until they kill the housekeeper. Everyman.

Still, beneath the thumpingly ordinary nature of our marriage — Everymarriage –runs the silent chyron of divorce. It’s the scarlet concept, the closely held contemplation of nearly every woman I know who has children who have been out of diapers for at least two years and a husband who won’t be in them for another 30. It’s the secret reverie of a demographic that freely discusses postpartum depression, eating disorders, and Ambien dependence (often all in the same sentence) with the plain candor of golden brown toast. In a let-it-all-hang-out culture, this is the given that stays tucked in.

…

Our mothers knew better than to ponder such questions, at least not out loud in front of God and the hairdresser. They deliberately waited to reach the last straw until their children were grown and the house was paid for. At 25, they were ladies with lady clothes and lady hairdos — bona fide adults, the astronauts’ wives. By 40, they were relics.

But we, we with our 21st-century access to youth captured in a gleaming Mason jar with a pinked square of gingham rubber-banded over the top, we are still visually tolerable if not downright irresistible when we’re 30 or 35 or 40. If you believe the fashion magazines — which I devoutly do — even 50- and 60-year-olds are (lick finger, touch to imaginary surface, make sizzle noise) pretty hot tickets.

We are also tickets with jobs and disposable income. If we jump ship now, we’re still attractive prospects who may have another shot at happiness. There’s just that tricky wicket of determining whether eternal comfort resides in the tried-and-true or whether the untried will be truer.

Our mothers, so old too young, believed that marriage was the best they could get. We, the children of mothers who settled (or were punished for not settling), wonder: Is this as good as it gets?

Our mothers feared being left alone. We crave time alone. Alone time is the new heroin.

…

Reasons and rationalizations abound and rebound. It doesn’t matter whether the infractions are big or small. At a certain point, we stop asking why and start asking how. How did it come to this? How much longer can I go on? When there are no hows left, the jig is up.

I recently stood by as a clothing designer, a mother in her 40s, announced to a group of women that she was divorcing her husband. The women’s faces flickered with curiosity, support, recognition, and — could it be? — yearning. Not a one of us suggested that she try harder to make it work. No voice murmured, “What a shame.”

Because it isn’t a shame. Divorce is no longer the shame that spits stain upon womanly merit. Conventional wisdom decrees that marriage takes work, but it doesn’t take work, it is work. It’s a job — intermittently fulfilling and annoying, with not enough vacation days. Divorce is a job too (with even fewer vacation days). It’s a matter of weighing your options.

…

To be sure, there will be throngs of angry women who will decry me for plunging a stake into the heart of holy matrimony. “My husband is my lifeline,” I’ve heard said (and that’s bad news for the aorta). “My husband and I never fight” is another marital chestnut — again, bad news (not to mention a big fat lie), since according to the experts, the strongest relationships are the ones in which people can continually agree to disagree. “My husband is my best friend,” others will aver.

No. Your husband is not your best friend. Your best friend is your best friend. If your husband were your best friend, what would that make your best friend — the dog? When a woman tells me that her husband is her best friend, what I hear is: I don’t really have any friends.

But if self-delusion is your particular poison, well, then that’s fine too. Just make sure that when you phone your life-order in, you say, “One self-delusion, please,” as opposed to “One perfect marriage.” Fantasy, as we all know, doesn’t deliver.

Because in the end, that’s basically what it’s all about: getting your order right. Our day comes down to choices — and it’s finally dawning on the long-term wives of the world that divorce may be the last-standing woman’s right to choose. We can admit that our marriages aren’t lambent, lyrical ice-dancing routines and still decide to push on together to the final flying sit spin. We also realize that divorce is an alternative that’s fully within reach, be it now or later or never. The more readily we acknowledge the solid utility of marriage (as one friend’s husband put it, “I’m essentially a checkbook and a sperm bank — but I’m okay with that!”), the more ably we can splinter the box of marital fantasy that makes us feel stuck, trapped, obliged. One eloquent swing of the ax and happiness is thrust firmly back into our own hands.

…

Maybe one day, marriage — like the human appendix, male nipples, or your pinky toes — will become a vestigial structure that will, in a millennium or two, be obsolete. Our great-great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren will ask each other in passing, “Remember marriage? What was its function again? Was it that maladaptive organ that intermittently produced gastrointestinal antigens and sometimes got so inflamed that it painfully erupted?”

Yes. Yes it was.

Until that day of obsolescence, we can confront the dilemma and consider the choice a privilege. Once upon a time is the stuff of fairy tales. As for happily ever after — see appendix.

So, let’s see. Immediately after disparaging her marriage and humiliating her husband (if she’s dreaming of divorce, she’ll probably get her wish after this article), she claims that she would never, EVER disparage her marriage. And this is because her husband, like all men, naturally, is not a good person. He is a moderately bad person. Not evil, but surely not good.

Get that, guys? You all suck. None of you are good people. You may not be Hitler evil, but you definitely are bad.

And you old-fashioned women who stayed married your entire lives? She gets you. She understands, this Ellen chick, that none of those women actually loved their husbands and were happy in their marriage. She understands that they were all just settling for a life of married misery. They were all just afraid to be alone, and so they settled. They didn’t marry men they loved. They settled. How quaint. And you know, being married to the same man for your entire life is exactly the same thing as wearing the same eyeshadow every day. It’s that superficial.

Then there’s divorce. No one thinks twice about divorce anymore, not in this Ellen’s circle. It’s no big deal, and they’re all secretly wishing they could be divorced too, anyways. And saying that it’s a shame to be divorced? You’re just some throwback to the ancient time of the 1950s when people got married for life. And don’t you dare let yourself believe that your husband could possibly be your best friend, you deluded idiot. Your friends are your friends, and your husband is the asshole making your life miserable. Get it straight! Thankfully, marriage will be obsolete one day, or so this woman wishes.

Why is this such a great thing?

Because this woman is a miserable bitch, and she wants all other women to be just like her. If marriage doesn’t work for her, it can’t work for anybody. And that’s the way it is.

When it comes down to it, I don’t understand how these women stay married. I don’t get how they didn’t scare away every man who had the gall to so much as try to speak to them. I feel so bad for the poor men in her life: her husband, her sons (if she has any), her brothers, her father. How does one come about having such a negative view of all men?

Answer? It’s because she’s the problem. It isn’t her husband. It isn’t men and it isn’t marriage. Every time I read these articles, I see the same thing: a bitter, miserable woman who is filled with hate. And because she’s bitter, miserable, and hate-filled, she makes it her mission to bring everyone else down to her same level of misery. If she can’t be happy in marriage, no one can. And of course, the concept of a marriage actually requiring work and commitment is something that she eschews. Why? Because she’s wonderful and perfect and great, and her damn good-for-nothing inconsiderate husband is the one who needs work. Not her. Oh, no. To the writers of these kinds of articles, the problem is never them. It’s always men, and society, and marriage in general.

It’s good to know that Oprah and CNN want to promote this kind of crap. Hey, another “marriage is disposable” article! Guess what, people? If you aren’t 100% happy, 100% of the time, you know what you should do? Give up! Get rid of whatever is making you unhappy, pronto. Your goal in life is to do whatever makes you feel good. If it makes you feel good, do it. It doesn’t matter what the long-term repercussions are or how it affects the people in your life. If it makes you feel good, then that’s all that matters.

The sad thing is is that women like this Ellen character always portray themselves are strong and independent. But what is strong about what she — and other women like her — is advocating? Nothing. Sticking by your husband (and husbands, sticking by your wives) takes strength. It takes courage, and fortitude, and hard work, and of course, love. The unhappiness in Ellen’s life is unlikely due to her marriage. It’s because of her, but in today’s society the fault is never your own. There’s always someone to blame. It’s so much easier to constantly be fault-finding, to always be putting the blame on your spouse’s shoulders, rather than take a long look at yourself in the mirror. It’s so easy to trivialize marriage and to generalize all men as inconsiderate loafs. It’s so easy to expect your spouse to do all the giving and you all the taking. Is it any surprise that this woman’s group of friends were completely unresponsive to the divorce of one of their friends?

Keep in mind that this woman also had no qualms about using her husband’s name. Repeatedly. That alone should give you a frightening glimpse into her psyche. Much of her article speaks for itself, but I’m tired of women like this bitch speaking for the rest of us. And I’m tired of this viewpoint of marriage and men not only being seen as acceptable, but being marketed to millions of women around the world. It isn’t OK, and even if the majority of other women let harpies like these speak for them, I sure as hell won’t. And you know why not? It’s wrong. That entire article, like so many before them, is filled with nothing but hate and bitterness. And it smears men across the country and the world, and we should all be outraged about it.

If this woman wants to be a selfish and miserable hate-filled harpy, that’s her perogative. But for her to slander all men, and to trash all marriages (even good ones), is crossing the line. What’s worse is that O Magazine ran this article! Was there not an editor with any measure of sanity working for them? If she’s crazy, then she can be crazy. But expecting the rest of us to defer to her insanity is just ridiculous.

And for what it’s worth, it makes women look much worse than it does men. And I’m sure as hell not going to let her speak in my name.

On a tip from reader Kyle.

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Seeing as how Biden didn’t correct himself, I have no idea if this was intentional or not. Given the amount of arrogance and ego that permeates the campaign of the Audacity Twins, who knows? It does bring to mind this image from Ace of Spades:

It just makes you want to laugh. Apparently, the RNC thinks so too. They’ve actually added a counter — I’m not even joking — until Biden’s next gaffe onto their website. Frikkin’ awesome.

Can I just go ahead and thank the Obamamessiah for adding Mr. Gaffetastic to his campaign? This is going to be so great. I’m really excited.

Hat Tip: Newsbusters

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The thing is, no one denies there are problems in Washington. Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals: we all agree that a lot of changes need to be made. The difference of opinion is on what changes need to be made and how. And if Barack Obama wants to run his entire campaign on the empty rhetoric of “change”, then how does Joe Biden fit into that? As Erik Erickson points out at Redstate:

1. When Joe Biden entered the United States Senate, John McCain was in his fifth year of captivity at the Hanoi Hilton.

2. Barry Obama was eight when Biden began his Senate career.

3. Nixon was starting his second term as President.

Joe Biden is more of a Washington insider than McCain is. I don’t necessarily see that as a negative, but Barack Obama has been portraying it as something terrible for his entire campaign. What now? Does he change his attitude about “Washington insiders”, or does he just ignore the contradiction? It’s just another sign that Biden was not the best pick for Obama to make.

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That is all.

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