You will see to your right a widget for the Pajamas Media Presidential Straw Poll. Those of you who have not voted in the poll i this week can click to open the booth there and vote. Those of you who have already voted will see results from this “precinct” first (RogerLSimon.com), then can click to see ALL VOTES coming in from the Pajamas Media portal and elsewhere (eventually).
Would you be kind enough to test this out and let me know in the comments below how it is working for you.
Please make suggestions if you have them. We went to place this widget on as many blogs and websites as possible (it will be fascinating to see how people are voting at various sites). And we would like to get it working as smoothly as possible.
Muchas gracias.
UPDATE: Already we have found a problem with MSIE 7. Working on it. (Firefox, Safari seemingly okay)
In a brilliant article in today’s JPost, Caroline Glick reminds an oblivious world that the Palestinian State everyone is clamoring for already exists. It started when Israel pulled out of Gaza. And no sane person would want to live there.
In these braindead partisan times, it’s a breath of fresh air when someone actually does something constructive. One of those people who can be relied upon to act that way is James Woolsey, so when I received an email pointing to a new video he was involved with, I clicked over to YouTube immediately, saw it and instantly brought it over to Pajamas Media and to this site. The topic: energy independence for America. We should have had it twenty years go, but better late than… as they say.
>
Apropos, I think the Bush administration’s greatest failure in the War on Terror and the War in Iraq was not to involve all of us personally, but to make it just a military thing for soldiers and their families – the rest of us should go shop. Why not have enlisted us all in an energy independence campaign after 9-11? He would have had the whole country with him.
Meanwhile, you can read about Set America Free here. I just bought a t-shirt.
UPDATE: I don’t know about all this talk about climate Armageddon coming from the UN… but even if they’re a quarter or a third right, it’s worth paying attention. (Of course we want to hear from scientists, not politicians and bureaucrats.) And all things considered, it’s yet another argument for Energy Independence – get the Saudis and the mullahs and save the environment at the same time – a two-fer.
Unlike the gang over at NRO, when I hear a man is building a 28,000 square foot house for himself, I don’t say “Good for him.” Call me a Puritan, but there are limits to what a man actually needs on Earth.
But I do share their repugnance at John Edwards’ monumental hypocrisy. Someone who goes around bloviating about two Americas should at least pay some attention to the appearance of his personal lifestyle, especially when running for President. The energy costs of a 28,000 foot MacMansion alone should give him pause, let alone the aesthetics. And let’s not get started about Katrina.
So I have a recommendation for him. He should do what the Hollywood stars do when people start to criticize their private jets and multi-million dollar residences in Malibu, Vail, etc. He should buy a Prius!
The ironically named Right Wing Nut House asks “Where is Everyone?” with regards to yesterday’s anti-war demonstration in Washington, saying that he was too young to go in Vietnam days, but wanted to.
Well, I was at those Vietnam demonstrations, several of them, as well as the March for Jobs and Freedom and other civil rights demonstrations. In those days, as RWNH indicates, demonstrating was cool. And it should have been. It was the right thing to do … sometimes anyway … at least on the civil rights side.
Now is another matter.
Yesterday’s demonstrations were a disaster from the organizing point of view, although the press won’t come out and admit it. Hardly anybody showed up. The Washington police no longer give attendance estimates – who can blame them – but from my memory of crowd configurations on the National Mall, this one looked puny indeed in the photos. The NYT said “tens of thousands” converged on the Mall, which is a common press euphemism for ten or twenty thousand. It looked more like the former. But even given the latter, that’s an horrendous showing . You could get more people for a Little League game.
Of course the usual suspects were there – Jesse Jackson (what else does he have to do?), Sean Penn and Jane Fonda, making her triumphant return to the protest scene. In some television footage, I heard Fonda telling the crowd we should stay away from Iraq because they were an “older culture we couldn’t understand” or some such. The idiocy of those remarks from a “feminist” boggles the mind. But, hey, she wore a nice coat.
So why did nobody show?
Maybe, deep down or not so deep down, the American public realizes the problems of our time are not remotely like Vietnam and the comparisons to that war being made by these aging protesters (Dick Gregory?) have nothing to do with the world situation and everything to do with them. Whatever one thinks about the War in Iraq, the situation we are in now – the global rise of Islamism, which is quickly overtaking Europe and has, as we all know, reached our own shores in a way Vietnam never did – is a hugely serious phenomenon with drastic consequences for our civilization (although evidently not for Jane Fonda). These jejune protesters have no answer for that, nor do they even mention it. If they did, they wouldn’t be protesting and they wouldn’t be on TV.
I was pleased to read Google’s acknowledgment of culpability for allowing China to censor the Internet giant’s search engine. Maybe they were listening to Tom Lantos. The Guardian’s report even hints that Google is going to do something about it and insist on no censorship, which would toss an interesting hot potato in China’s lap.
How would China react? This is no small question. China, as most of us would agree, is not a communist state in any sense Karl Marx would recognize, but more like a repressive Las Vegas. It frequently behaves schizophrenically, embracing modernity and primitivism at the same time. One example of this schizophrenia are the near simultaneous reports that Harbin scientists have been able to breed a florescent pig while China itself has banned advertising of its own traditional Year of the Pig in order not to offend Muslims.
In some ways frightened, China feels it constantly has to balance between its energy source (the Islamic world) and its market – the West. Added to this are the natural totalitarian tendencies of a post-communist state. What can we do to help? Well, mighty Google can by applying pressure for freedom. As for the rest of us, we might seriously think about a Manhattan Project for alternative energy sources. It worked once.
Hollywood, ever driven by the chic, is threatening to desert Hillary Clinton for Barack Obama, according to this ABC article. (Actually, I have heard rumors of this for several weeks, including that the instigator of this defection may be someone prominent on the Internet the show biz crowd thinks of as a deep political thinker.)
This is bad news for Hillary, just as it is dimwitted for Hollywood players to jump on such an untested bandwagon. But since the leading motivation of Hollywood political types has always been to be perceived as politically progressive, rather actually to be it, this is par for the course. The idea of someone like David Geffen as a “man of the people” is beyond ludicrous, but there he is scurrying to be first on his (Malibu beachfront) block to be underwriting the seemingly ultra-politically correct Mr. Obama – a man of peace who fully understands, unlike Hillary and her husband, what a reckless endeavor Iraq is and was. Yet in the world of deeper ironies, it would be this same chic Hollywood crowd who would be the first to be beheaded were Islamism to be successful. But in the palm-lined corridors of the Beverly Hills Hotel, where room service is always available, they could never dream such a thing to be possible.
Who was John Kerry crying for on the Senate floor as he announced he will not run for the Presidency? John Edwards said he knew the decision was a difficult one for Kerry “because we know his first instinct is always to respond to any call to serve his country.” Oh, pul-leeze. The call to “serve one’s country” is one of the great canards of our time. Kerry was crying for one person only – himself. He was crying for the failure of his ambitions. The rest of us are immaterial.
We’ve had over twelve thousand votes cast in the PJM Straw Poll and the results so far are fascinating to me – although I am not clear what to make of them. Apparently our readers, the ones voting anyway, are not too fond of John McCain who is running a surprisingly low 5.3 percent at this writing. Gingrich is running stronger than I expected and Giuliani is in the lead.
On the Dem side, we have Obama strongly in the lead with Richardson second. I think Richardson’s high numbers may be accounted for by his being a favorite of Republicans. We encourage people to vote in both parties. (It could be that some voters are choosing candidates in their “enemy” party they think would be losers for that party.) As for Obama, the poll was linked by the Huffington Post and this may account for his popularity. Hillary is known not be a favorite of Arianna’s.
But I speculate. The truth is I’m not sure what’s going on. I do know that some of the campaigns are watching the poll. I also suspect we will have some profound swings in the weeks to come. (It’s a weekly poll.) These swings may even be early harbingers of swings in the wider public. It will be interesting to see.
We inadvertently left off Ron Paul from our Republican candidate list and will add him next week – Fred Thompson also, whose name has been bandied about. We didn’t think it fair to either of them to add them midweek. We’ll also be keeping an eye out for third party candidates as they surface.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has persuaded me that a Bill Richardson candidacy could be formidable. Perhaps his numbers are no accident.
